Up Close and Personal

1. To develop my ideas for this project I came up with fifteen ideas and narrowed it down to ten. Then I elaborated on the ten ideas and picked two. I chose daisy and leaves as my top two and printed out references for both. Then I drew thumbnails and final sketches. I ended up choosing leaves because I thought I could use a lot of value and detail up close.
2. I demonstrated emphasis by contrasting vibrant colors in the leaf with the black paper in the background.
3. The medium I used was colored pencil. I chose this over chalk or oil pastel because I could easily add more small details with the colored pencils. This included the veins of the leaf.  It enhances the realistic aspect of the leaf and the color change by making it smoother.

4. I took a risk using colored pencil because it can be hard to layer the colors. I also took a risk using black paper because it is harder to contrast colors on it and make them stand out.

5. Of the five characteristics of great art I included technique and concept.  I used layering and highlighting with the colored pencils and the concept of up close and personal.

What's the Point?

Some of my solutions were pencils, finger pointing, an arrow, a dancer, and point on a map. I choose the pencil idea because I thought I could be more creative and expand on my idea by adding an eraser, pencil sharpener, unsharpened pencils, a piece of paper and pencil shavings.  I showed contrast with overlapping the pencil over the paper, adding shadows, and making value with cross hatching, contour lines, and stippling. I decieded to use pen and ink as my medium because I knew I wanted to do stippling and pen would be a good option. The techniques I used was stippling, contour lines, cross hatching, and overlapping. I took a risk by using stippling which takes up a lot of time and using pen because its harder to add value with pen. I also can't erase pen so if I made a mistake it would be hard to fix.  The message was about opposites and the literal point of the pencil lead.  The opposites are the sharpened and unsharpened pencils, and the sharpener and eraser.

Three Point Perspective

For this project I used three point perspective to create this building.  I wanted to create the illusion that it was tall so I put one of the view points at the top of the paper.  One of the requirements of the project was to have tessellations so I used it on the sides of the building.  I also needed to make it unrealistic, and I did this by making the building appear to go into the sky and having a planet so close in the background.  In addition I put the building in water.  I added value in the clouds, bird, planet, building, windows, and underwater.  The value makes it more dimensional. 

Acrylic Landscape Painting

To organize my painting I cut out pictures from magazines and used them to draw a textured landscape with marker on a piece of paper.  I used the marker landscape to know the layout of my painting.  Then I had to include atmospheric perspective which is having a sky, background, middle ground, and foreground.  I created this by having sand, water, an island, and a sunset.  My light source was created with shadows around the plant.  My color scheme was analogous using blues and some purple and green.  The brush strokes used for the sky were horizontal and long, but I used small, short brush strokes for the island trees and plant.  I used value in my painting in the sky by making the top of the the sky darker than the bottom.  I also made the water lighter as it was closer to the sand.  I also used value when creating the cast shadow of the plant.  

Logo

To create this logo I sketched designs using patterns and designs that I liked.  Then I chose some that I could incorporate into my logo using my first and last name initials.  I decided to use a flower, anchor, swirls, box lettering, and chevron print to create the design.  I choose the flower because I like drawing them and I thought it would make a good center.  I choose an anchor because I love the beach and water.  The other details are just things I thought would look good in contrast to the flower.  After I created the logo I put it on a piece of white paper and went over it with black marker.  Finally, to make it smaller, the logo was shrunk.   

Ceramics Project

The medium of my project is clay and the size of my project is a diameter of 8 inches by 4 inches high.  The design element that was stressed during the contruction was form.  The technique used was slump which is putting the clay in a bowl.  My piece could be used to hold things but I don't have a function for it.  To create the design for this project I cut out of paper a design for the bowl shape, and I looked at radial designs.  During this project I learned about kilns, the stages of clay, radial designs, and glazing.  If I could change the project I wouldn't have painted the design in the center because a lot of it ended up not showing through.  

Pastel Still Life

To plan my composition I brought in three nail polish bottles and put one nail polish bottle in front of the other two to add dimension and make it more symmetrical.  I used a thumbnail sketch to plan where each bottle would go.  A thumbnail sketch is a small sketch that isn't detailed but shows where you want your objects to go.  The viewfinder helped me decide the angle and perspective I wanted to use for my still life.  To make my items appear three dimensional I added value, shading, and shadows.  To create a light source I made one side of the wall and table darker, and I added a shadow going the opposite way of the light.