Book carving

Before I started carving I had to come up with a well thought out plan, first I had to figure out what I was going to carve and label my layers. Figuring out the layers was really important, if I would have started carving without figuring them out the project would have been so much more confusing. When I was carving the book I realized that I could only carve about 4 pages at a time which made the project take longer and was kind of frustrating. Another thing that frustrated me was sometimes the exacto knife would slip and make minor cuts in places I was supposed to cut. My theme was love so I decided to carve out a heart and in the pages I wrote the how do I love thee poem. I decided to call it the book of love. At first I didnt think carving a book was going to be so easy and I thought i would mess up. Once I actually started the project I started thinking positvely and ended up actually liking it. This was by far one of my favorite projects. 

Character design

I decided to go with a classic story for this project which is snow White.  I used snow White and the evil stepmother/witch. For the rnviromrnt I decided to use the scene where snow takes a the apple.  Snow White is sitting outside of the dwarfs house while the stepmother is creeping up out of the dark forest with the poison Apple.  I wanted to show the good and bad so I had the forest slowly get darker as it got closer to the stepmother. The reason I have snow white wearing a beautiful dress and the witch wearing a tattered raggy dress is because I wanted snow white to stand out and look pure because she is innocent.

Mixed media

The theme for this project was to create a piece related to amusement using mixed media. I think I accomplished this by pasting different cut outs of carnies and glued them all next to eachother to make it look like one whole picture. For my mixed media I used water and tissue paper to create an abstract wash for the background. I also used magazine cutouts of letters to say carnival Friday to make it look like an ad and cut outs of pictures I printed off the Internet. Our visual journal lessons taught us how to use different and random medias and put them together in one picture without making it look like a mess. I think I took a risk by wanting to make it look like a poster because everyone else created pictures that had a scene going on but over all i like the outcome, I think it looks vintage.

Figure drawing

The purpose of figure drawing is to show the proportion and shape of a body, I accomplished this by drawing the actual shape of each body part and making sure each body part was proportional to the rest of the body. The drawing exercise helped me to draw the figures a little faster than it would take to sit down and draw most actual drawings. I thought the charcoal pencils were really the best media to use because they were free and weren't thin or easy to break like the vine charcoal. I found figure drawing frustrating because it's hard to draw a proportional human figure within a minute because you want it all to be perfect.  

Look how that animal moves

I used the prismacolors to show texture in the Fox by drawing out each individual strand of hair in the fur and value in the sky by making it slowly fade to make it look like a sunset. The animal was really supposed to be moving but I just wanted it to be a calm picture so I chose to have it sleeping. Throughout this project I learned how to show value and shadows really well in my  drawings. At the beginning of the project it was really frustrating to show the shadows in the picture because I was scared to really use the dark, I thought it was going to mess up the drawing.

Non traditional portrait

I chose to do a portrait of myself when I was younger. Different materials I thought of using was scrap book paper, buttons, and food coloring. I ended up using scrapbook paper which I thought would be easy but once I got to the face it was really hard so I just kept the facial features out, which ended up looking kinda cool. The material I used made the texture of my portrait a little rough, but i like it.

Sticky situation

For this project I chose being attacked by an animal I didn't really want to paint someone actually being attacked so it turned into cheetah spots falling off the cheetah. I think I was able to think outside of the box because spots dont actually fall off of cheetahs. The spots surrounding the animal incorporate rhythm and repetition. I used acrylic paint for this project so I could layer the paint. The mini lessons we did in class didn't really apply to my painting.