The Cardboard Catastrophe

The awaited cardboard thing! I have to admit I kind of surprised myself here. I don't know HOW I managed to survive last night through all the crazy insane cardboard madness until four in the morning until I MOSTLY got it to look the way I wanted to! The pictures below show the beginning and the end of the process, I was too frustrated to take too many pictures during the whole middle part of the production. Keep in mind I'm using my phone for these pictures I don't have a great camera with me at the moment so the quality of these pictures is going to be crapola but it will do for now. In the pictures you can see the original frame work of the sculpture, the geometry of the back and back of the head, and the beginnings of the workings on the face. Then you can see the finished product as it was just before I turned it in this morning! It's a big weight off my shoulders that is for sure, I never would have imagined making a bust out of cardboard would be something I would have done ever.

Over all impressions...I am actually kinda proud of myself! This is something very new for me, most of my work is drawing or painting of some sort. I'm not FULLY happy with the lips but I think it does resemble me. Maybe not to a T but there is definitely a resemblance! The most intimidating part of it I think would have to be how to do the eyes...and that hat. That hat gave me so much trouble at one point I thought I was going to ruin the whole project at 2 in the morning the night before! First I made a hat separately but the cardboard wasn't flexible enough and it didn't fit with the shape of the head at all and needless to say I wasn't exactly a happy camper! Finally I actually molded the hat onto the head itself by using the separated brown paper from the corrugated cardboard which was a lot more flexible.

Next project? I am making a clay thing-a-majig for that class of a very stylized sunflower. We are going to be making these things, then making a mold out of plaster and casting them again in paper. Each of our pieces will be fit together to form one giant abstract nature artwork. Should be interesting! Aside from that I am doing self portraiture in Drawing Observation and Invention. I will put up the brief sketches tomorrow, for now here is the anticipated CARDBOARD CATASTROPHE! Which may not have been such a catastrophe after all.

         

Aggregations

Alright I know I said I would post up the cardboard sculpture but I felt this had to be put up first! Cardboard sculpture will be up Wednesday night however.
This post was inspired by a show I went to the other week called Aggregations and it was absolutely incredible. The exhibit is being shown at Towson in the Asian Arts Exhibit which was beyond convenient. The artists name is Kwang Young Chun and the images below are only a few from the gallery and all of them are made from tiny triangles of mulberry paper from old Korean books he had collected over time. He uses natural pigments for the color and shading in the artwork. I think part of what made his work so exciting for me was that it was slightly three dimensional and yet the shading added a completely different dynamic. If at all possible it is definitely something I would recommend anyone seeing! From far away you get these gaping crater effects but when up close you can see individual lettering on the triangles from the books and how the shadows of each triangle play with each other. When asked the artist revealed that some of the triangles took as much as 8000 folded pieces! The artist himself was hysterical and it was neat to be able to see someone who had stayed true to himself to the point of creating his own style of art that is unique and different. I can only imagine the level of patience and determination it would take to create even a FRACTION of one of these pieces of art!!
Aside from the art work, which as I said was definitely awe inspiring, the gallery itself really added a little extra something. The lighting in particular was really effective in that it shone down on all the pieces from above. The lighting was soft enough to not take away from the over all work yet it emphasized all of the triangular pieces by casting new shadows that mingled with the manufactured shadows. This was only interrupted a couple times during the artists talk when one woman hit the light switch with her elbow and shut off the lights a few times!
Again it was an amazing show and I highly recommend every one who sees this to go and look at his work up close! But for those who can't here are some images from the show, and a link to the calendar associated with this event:

AGGREGATIONS

My Work

Alright! Second required post and a little somethin before I start putting up the whole sculpture process I'm working on. I told you I'd be back before then! Much of my work has been done in pencil or charcoal, some  of it is actually work that was requested by friends or commissioned while other pieces were done for class or just for fun. I didn't have alot of images on my computer but here are some of the images I do have:

This image was taken straight from my sketch book and wasn't really drawn for any particular reason other than that the area around where my parents live contains alot of broken down barns and buildings that I find fascinating. It was done in pen and inks (my favorite micron pens that I now use for absolutely everything including note taking!) and I tried to focus more on the feel of the building with scribbled lines and the deep shadows on the barn in the center.

This is actually a portrait I drew from a magazine picture. A year or so back, before I was an art major, I took a non-art majors drawing course just for the hell of it and because I couldn't seem to stay away from the art world! Towards the end of the semester we began doing portraits and were instructed to draw 7 portraits of people we find in magazines. This was one of them. I used graphite for a majority of the image and soft pastel pencils for the color pops of yelllow and red/pink.

Yet another image for class but much more recent! This piece was done last semester for my first art major course: 2D with Vonminor. He knows how meticulous I am so the fact that this was one of my first projects pretty much floored him and made me proud as all git out to have pushed so far outta my comfort zone! This was done with black and white acrylic paint and news paper. I used pallet knife for the painting to create that kind of bursting effect and the newspaper brought a more organized contrast to the random paint streaks. The fun part about this project was that we had to do this based of off a previous sketch we had done in the course. So I took a sketch of a fake rooster which was very meticulous and zoomed in and created this! Definitely had alot of fun with this picture.

This owl was done last semester just for fun in my sketchbook. At the time I had a broken arm so I was practicing my details with my cast on, and I was pretty pleased with the result. I used graphite for the majority of the picture and then colored pencils for the colors in the eyes. I like making things quirky, which was what I attempted to do here with the chucks and the overly large eyes of different sizes.

This was actually one of the final drawings for that non-art majors course I took. We had to create a creature and try to  make it look as realistic as possible despite the fact that it was going to be a quirky pieced together bunch of crazyness! I have no clue why but I keep coming back to these quirky little birds. Unlike the owl above this little bird was something that I arrived at after looking at several pictures of different birds. Duck feet with long gawky looking legs, tiny wings, that long crooked neck, the puff head and overly large beak. I tried to play with proportions to make this little guy look as gawky and quirky as I possibly could. The bow tie was just an added touch because I felt it was missing something. I used all graphite for this image ranging from HB pencils to 6B.

This is the most recent of all of the work I am posting up at the moment. And the only complete painting as well! This was a commission that I was pulled in for by a friend of mine. He races competitively with longboarding and saw my work and wanted me to do something custom for him. I used acrylic paint for the whole board. I had so much fun with this one because it was the most different painting I'd ever been asked to do. And by far the most exciting because this board is now being used in competitions which gives me some publicity!

As you can see I am fairly comfortable working with graphite and just with drawing in general. I'm branching out a bit now with painting and sculpture and really trying to diversify my work through all different mediums. That is also why I'm so excited to really begin doing some digital work because I feel like it will really be a selling point for me as an artist in today's job climate and just in general really. It seems like everyone is looking for you to be able to work with digital tools, the traditional media isn't enough to get by on these days. At least that is how it appears.

Anywho I will be posting again soon with some images of the cardboard catastrophe that I am working on! Wish me luck!

The Wonders of Cardboard

Oh the things you learn every day. Subconsciously you know as an art student that there are a slew of other artists all around the world who are making incredible works of art as we sit in our classrooms wishing to be like them...in some way shape or form at least. We all know this, at least I do, however it never ceases to amaze me how incredible some of these artists are with the materials they use. And thus we come to the topic of this blog post.

Cardboard.

I was recently told to do a self sculpture (shoulders up) completely out of cardboard and I had no clue where to start. I think that this was kind of her goal, because immediately after telling us to do this she showed us a few examples of how we could go about this task. Thus we have:

Chris Gilmour

and, Scott Fife:

I can only hope that my "sculpture", which is being referred to as the cardboard catastrophe at the moment, turns out even a fraction as well as these examples! For starters, Chris Gilmour and Scott Fife are geniuses. Gilmour's level of detail in his machinery sculptures is astounding, he captures everything down to the upholstery in the cars, the break lines and nuts and bolts in his motorcycles, everything is precise and as realistically rendered as I have ever seen. And Fife's take on sculpture is so different from Gilmour's yet in its own way is just as realistic. He adds paint to some, but the main difference is the obvious ability to see the different pieces of cardboard and how they are pinned together. His portraiture looks a little eerie to me because of the paint I think, almost zombie-like. But that's half the charm now isn't it?

Well I wanted to post this as a little precursor to the sculpture I myself am doing! Soooo, I will have that post up sometime next week showing the progress and the maybe semi-finished. I'm sure I will be posting other artwork before then anyways, but there's something to look forward to! I just hope when I finish it actually looks like a human being period.

Blog 01 aka Hello Blogger Land!

This isn't the first time I've attempted to make a blog. I had one on Wordpress which didn't really take off, and I've been posting things on Tumblr occasionally. This, however, is the first time that I've ever had to do something like this for school! Usually the internet is a distraction, and now it's actually a part of work! Also, since this is going to be for class I will be more inclined to keep up with it! So hopefully this blog is more successful than previous attempts!

While class is the reason this blog was created in the first place, I am hoping to make it a little bit more than that. Ideally this is going to become a place for thoughts, ideas, and all else that has to do with this crazy process leading up to my future art career. Starting of course with this semesters art courses such as Digital tools and Concepts! I want this to become a place where I can brainstorm, share the projects I'm doing in class, and share some of the things that are inspiring me along the way. This being my first real exposure to creating digital artwork there will probably be some frustrations documented here as well! Yet my intention is not to create a diary where I'm logging personal information about my day to day life all the time.

This blogs intention is for thoughts and ideas, yes, but purely related to art and the whole collegiate experience of studying it. It took me a while to figure out that this was what I wanted to do with my life. So why not document the experience? Choosing art as a career, no matter what field, isn't an easy career path. There are moments where nothing is certain and you just have to jump and trust you'll land on your feet. So yeah, this blog is an assignment for class, but that doesn't mean I can't turn it into something important to me as well. That's the intention of my blog, to create a place where I can share my artistic journey wherever it leads and share my work and the work of those whom inspire me.