Project 1: Prismacolor Final

I'd never really thought about using colored pencils before doing this piece, and when we started the project I was honestly a little bit intimidated by the prospect. After making several practice sketches and blocking out the colors, I felt pretty confident in beginning. I started with the reflection of the chair and the bear in the pendulum, using lots of golds and oranges and yellows to give it a warm look (while leaving room for the chains in the background). The next step was to add in the chains. During previous sketches I had had difficulty in making the chains pop out from the paper and the background. Mrs. Rossi suggested using a blue to emphasize the shadows. I really liked how the blue not only made the chains pop from the warm yellowy-orange background, but also tied in the blue that was in the rocking chair to the rest of the picture. The chains were easily the most time consuming part and I did get a little bit frustrated with them, especially the smaller two chains on the left, but I am really happy with how they turned out. After I completed the chains, I put in dark values for the foreground and the wall in the background, mostly dark browns with little bits of whites and greens to add variation.

I had a great time with this project and definitely look forward to using colored pencils again. I really like the bold colors you can achieve with the Prismas and the great variations in texture that are possible as well. Another aspect of the Prismas that I really like is their ability to be layered. Not only does this enable you to achieve very rich and varied colors, but by layering the same or similar colors on top of each other throughout a piece,  you can really create a color scheme that ties the whole piece together.

Practice with oils

This was the first time I had ever used oils before. I really like acrylic paint and I have been wanting to try oils for a while but never had the opportunity. The first thing I noticed was how easy it is to make mud out of them - being used to acrylics, I am accustomed to the ability to paint one color on and then if I don't like how it looks, go back ten minutes later and change it to a color I like better. The slow-drying nature of oil paints doesn't allow for this, so I quickly realized I would have to be more strategic about my color placement and which order I painted the colors on in order to have bright and vibrant colors. The apple I painted second and solely with a palette knife. At first it felt really awkward, but I got used to it and I really like how the palette knife enables me to make very expressive strokes, which is easily my favorite quality about oil paints.

Representational Reflection Drawing Progress

As of the beginning of this week, this is my progress. I'm currently working on adding in the two additional chains on the far left of the picture and also their reflections in the pendulum. Then I plan on going back and working more dark colors into the background on the left hand side.

Representational Drawing Progress

Practice

Artist Statement

Art is so powerful because of its unique ability to alter the viewpoint from which one observes the world. I feel an artist is most successful when he/she communicates their view of the world so successfully that it causes others to take a step back and reevaluate their own.

The reason I find art so interesting is its ability to portray the world that we are all experiencing together through the special lenses that the artist uses to view the world, almost a behind-the-scenes of sorts. In my art, I endeavor to portray the world as I perceive it and to bring attention to the everyday occurrences that I find captivating. By focusing on what I found important per my view of the world I incorporate my likes and dislikes, preferences in composition and scenery, and in mood and atmosphere.  A "good" work of art is one that causes the viewer to reflect on the purpose of the artist's work or better yet reflect on how the artists interpretation of the subject matter compares with their own.

Mural Update

With the year coming to a close, here's an update about our mural progress. Over the past several weeks, Hannah, Jessica, and I have made a ton of progress on the mural and learned lots of things along the way too, like when Mrs. Rossi says house paint must be blended together when both colors are wet, that means do it that day or you'll have to repaint it all again the next day, that when you go to buy house paint you need to know what gloss you're looking for (or you'll be making another trip), and that no matter how neat you try to be paint will splatter and drip.



Last blog post we had just finished brainstorming ideas and painted the background color, our next step was to sketch our design on the wall. I was dreading this part, but it turned out to be really simple - we borrowed the ELMO and projected Jessica's design on the wall and then simply sketched it on in chalk.

Color scheme we chose

Then we had to figure out color placement, so we each took a blank copy of Jessica's sketch and tried different color combinations. We decided on Hannah's, which utilized bright complimentary colors to make the leaves pop out from the background and each other and gave the wall the desired whimsy.

Most recently, we've been blocking in the leaves in the colors we decided on. We've made some changes along the way as our ideas evolved, and as we saw how the colors appeared side by side on the wall. The most critical part throughout the whole endeavor has really been the incorporation of values. We started off with leafy green elodea-like plants, and realized that the values would really have to be very intense and exaggerated to give the mural the depth we desired. Now we have almost all the leaves blocked in, and we are going to paint in bubbles and fish with the last few days we have this week.


Successes with this project - One of the most important aspects of this project for me has personal ties as well as the obvious artistic ones. Through working on this project, I've reevaluated the role of art in my life, from a creative outlet, to something more, something that can impact others as well . It's been a fantastic opportunity to get to work on something this visible that touches so many people. Instead of working hard on a piece for hours and then setting it aside in a portfolio, I get to see people react to our work everyday, an experience which has reinforced the important role of art in my life and the lives of others. Other teachers have mentioned wanting a mural in their room, and now when the three of us are walking down the hallways, we notice the blank stark walls and think about what a difference even just a little bit of color could make, how much more welcoming the space would seem. Needless to say, collaboration has played a huge role in this project, not just between Hannah, Jessica and myself, but also with the teachers involved. They've given us their feedback as we worked, and Hannah even  set up a comment board on the door to the room which has enabled us to receive feedback from many other students as well.

We've had a few bumps along the way, at first we really had trouble blending the colors of the background the way we wanted, as both portions had to be wet. After the first few days we figured out that if we worked in teams of two blending the two shades together we could achieve the look we desired. Additionally, there are a few leaves we've painted over multiple times, as the first tries were to dull or, in one case, too similar to the background color, and so made the leaf behind it look as if it had a hole in it.

In painting this mural, I've had the opportunity to become part of a community I would never have otherwise. Never having taken a computer class, I wouldn't have even entered room 605, let alone spend many hours there. I've gotten to meet new people and see the manifestation of others' hard work in areas of interests different than my own, such as video game creation. I've gained an appreciation for how people with different skills and interests can come together and create something beneficial to both - we, the artists, gain experience and the classes and teachers gain a colorful addition to their room.

There are still some final touches left, bubbles and fish and the border of our portal to the sea, but here's our current progress.

Parallelism Project Morphs in Mural

Instead of working on the parallelism assignment, I'm creating another mural, a project that spun off of our previous chalk mural. While we were working on our chalk mural in the courtyard, a teacher approached us about working on a mural in her room. She teaches computer classes and said that for years she'd been wanting to paint a mural in her room to help make the technology classes more appealing to women. She explained that women make great programmers but they often don't chose that course of study because they feel uncomfortable in that environment/ feel as though they don't belong . Later in the week we went to look at the wall she had in mind and started sketching out our ideas. At first we were thinking about doing a landscape of some sort, but then Hannah suggested something more graphic and bold that would have a larger impact on the space. She found this picture for inspiration. We loved the bright colors and the organic shapes, and plan to also incorporate bubbles and fish to the leafy background. Instead of using the darker hues as our background, we switched to turquoises which girls in the class said were more appealing to them. This past week we started painting the background color of the wall, a mix of three tints of turquoise. We also blocked off the wall to look like a portal to further the illusion of being under the sea.