Partner in Crime

I've discovered in the past year or so that becoming an art major means so much more than just dedicating all of your time into honing your artistic talents. More so than any other major I think that becoming an art major means entering into a family of people just as crazy and outside the box as you are! My friend Kaitlin Dorsey is a perfect example of this. I have known Kaitlin for about a year now and she has become my closest friend in the art world, she is as I stated in the title of this post my partner in crime! We both went through a very similar transition, me from a biology major and her from nursing, into the art world and have been close friends ever since.

Her art process reveals a lot about who she is as an individual. When discussing this with her she said "My art process usually starts with whatever my mood is or whatever event is going on in my life. Whether it's a breakup or school or a certain interest I might have at the time. Whatever I'm feeling, my art usually reflects it." To simplify it even more, when she is feeling happy she tends to draw lighter images but when she is feeling upset or angry her drawings could gravitate anywhere from skulls and hearts to dislocated eyeballs! Her bubbly and eclectic personality practically     jumps out at you from her art work regardless, it doesn't matter if the mood is sad or happy or angry. She effectively carries across that mood to the audience in all of her artwork while at the same time giving it a little twist that is uniquely her own. 

While painting, with oil paints in particular, seems to be the bane of her existence she has an intense love of toned paper, texture, and color pencil. These three are combined frequently in her work. While paint is not very easily controlled in her opinion, she handles her colored pencil drawings masterfully. Lately she has been experimenting with illustration board by scoring it, with objects such as a staple remover, and then drawing on it with colored pencils and other materials. Her innovation, both in materials and purely in the ideas that she comes up with, is most definitely inspiring and I can't wait to see what she does as a graphic design major. 
She has most certainly hit the ground running!

A day in the life of MOI!

A day in the life of meee, Wednesday 7th 2012! My life is crazy and hectic and I love every minute, even those minutes where all I wanna do is curl up in a ball and avoid all my work and sleep! The assignment this time was to create a photo montage that follows one day in your life. This particular day was one of my busiest days of the week! I had Drawing Observation and Invention, Digital Tools and Concepts, a meeting with my 3D professor, Art History, and then a visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art! Throughout the day I took pictures of my friends and the things that I saw and ate and wrote in, and that is what this montage is all about.

The Digital Self Portrait Numero Uno

  In every course I have signed up for this semester, aside from my Art History course and my Writing About Art Course, I have been given several assignments that have had to do with self portraiture. In my drawing class this meant doing charcoal sketches and rendering, in 3D process it meant creating a likeness of myself with cardboard, in Digital this assignment was slightly different. The first self portrait we were assigned wasn't even a LITERAL self portrait, it was more a collection of items and images that when smashed together represented who you are in a way. This assignment also stretched my knowledge of Photoshop quite a bit! I am no guru when it comes to technology, I am learning but it's a slow process! However I think this assignment was neat. It took the self portraiture to a different level.
   The boundaries of the project were that you had to select three items of yours to scan to the computer, one physical part of yourself, something that you've drawn, and use two digital photographs either of you or that you have taken. This is how mine turned out:

   Here I used my hand as the physical part of myself, partially because it was the easiest thing for me to photocopy and I've never had to scan anything other than pictures or documents! My objects were my necklace which was given to me by my friends mom when we lived in Spain, some silk sunflowers, and a masquerade mask I got from one of those small side stores in the mall. That one had to be my favorite, it has musical notes on it and delicate gold patterns around the edge. My two images are the black and white picture of me drawing in a windowsill and another picture of me from which I took the glasses and the eyes. And last but not least the drawing included is that owl in the right hand corner which is also reflected in the glasses above. Each item was picked because I either liked it or it meant something special to me. The sunflowers reflect a lot in my life, living in Spain in particular which is also where my necklace came from. I think for my first real Photoshop assignment this wasn't too bad!

   The storm rolled through Maryland quickly and gave me plenty of time to sketch, catch up on sleep, and work on that plaster mess that is due this week! That project and the watercolor in Illustrator will be up by the end of this week, so until then...or until I find something equally amazing to talk about...see ya blogger land!

System Drawing/Painting

   Well the system drawing is done! It really is more of a painting in my case but I am pleased with how it turned out! I wound up downsizing the canvas a little bit to better suit my materials. Below are a few images showing the surface on which I was drawing/painting, the project half way through, and the finished product. There were a few issues that popped up in the process of making this larger version!

   First off as you can tell the surface is much different than the original small mock up. It was slightly textured thanks to the paper cut outs pasted against the canvas, small wrinkles created a pattern whenever I would put the buzz light year shoe print on the paper. The paint also didn't absorb like it did with the canvas material. However despite these slight short comings the surface worked well over all! And I kind of liked the way the paint stood out against it instead of absorbing.

   About half way through and I started having some issues with the face! I realized something. Whenever I am doing a portrait of someone I tend to try and be kind with the image, make a larger nose smaller or cheek bones more defined etc. I don't do these things on purpose, it just kind of happens? Anyways I realized while painting this that I kind of made her nose much smaller in the mock up of this project, it didn't really look like her. So when I tried to remedy that in this version of the painting it kind of looked strange to me. Now that I've finished it and I have had some time to put it aside and then look at it again it looks much better to me.

   And this is the finished product! My thought process behind this portrait was a bit different. The portrait is of Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut in space. I could have done a lot of different things that had to do with space and her being an astronaut but I wanted to approach this differently. I wanted this image to express more about her than just her job. As I said in one of my previous posts where I discussed the mock up for this project I wanted to focus on her connection with children seeing as it was one of the few parts of her life that she shared with the world. In the mock up it didn't really come across as I'd hoped because people couldn't really see the boot print very well on the small scale. I attempted to remedy the error in communication of my idea here with the background. I made several "stickers" of the kind you would see as a younger student in school. Rocket ships, pencils, crayons, planets and stars, my hope is that this would lighten up the atmosphere of the piece. The comment made before by my professor was that it was very graphic and that in part didn't communicate my idea.

   I might be writing quite a few posts over the next few days seeing as Hurricane Sandy is suppose to be hitting us over here starting tomorrow and carrying through until Thursday! So I will be confined to my work and hopefully will have plenty to show and talk about by the time it's through. I have a few requests for tattoo designs in the workings and of course my class work. Until then I will bid you all adieu!

Themes and Ideas

This week I've been asked to talk about my own art work and the themes and ideas that seem to reoccur throughout my drawings and paintings. I have to be honest I really haven't thought about that very much! I do tend to gravitate towards portraits, drawing nature, and I have a fascination for old buildings. I tend to be very meticulous in my art work as well as most other aspects of my life, I blame that on my fathers OCD I swear it rubs off. I'd say that that is my style as of now, I like to try to render drawings as closely to the actual object as I can. I almost don't like to pin down my style though because right now that is constantly something that is growing and changing as I learn different techniques. I'm sure my themes will have changed years from now as well! But for now much of my drawings tend to stick to those three categories  portraits, nature, and old buildings.

Human beings are fascinating. We truly are. The amount of expression that can be captured in the lines of our faces is something that has always captured my attention. It's what makes drawing portraits so much fun for me. I think that is why I gravitate towards that theme at time. Most of my portraiture is in black and white, I think that pulling most of the color from the face really makes the individuals features speak for themselves. Seeing as my first two years at college I was a biology major I'm constantly looking at the face and seeing the underlying workings of it. I like how it is a bit of a puzzle to be solved, being able to make an image on the paper seem living and breathing, to make the image look as if it is oozing some sort of emotion.

My theme of nature I think is derived from this liking of people. Drawing things from nature often requires you to solve the problem of making the drawing on the page seem ALIVE. At least when you are going for realism which seems to be something I am consistently striving for. I think that my love of nature is also just a big part of me, many of my best memories have been made outside in the open. Nature is taken for granted far more often than not. I like to draw it because I think it is beautiful. And I don't just mean the flowers when I say that. I like unconventional beauty as well. I see beauty in simple things, even in ugly things sometimes. I think there is something to be said about things people consider ugly. The skull of a bird, bugs, the way grass shoves its way up through the pavement, dead leaves, all of it holds interest to me. It is a part of life and I tend to draw what is going on around me from the people I am with to the surroundings. I like to make the animals I draw quirky at times. Like my owl wearing converse or the topsy turvy bird I drew from a while back. That quirkiness gives the animals an almost cartoon feeling at times.

As for the old buildings! I like when there is history behind objects. For example, a hair ribbon looks like nothing more than a piece of ribbon until the owner tells you that the ribbon was from her grandmother who use to tie it in her hair for her when she was little. There are so many stories behind so many little things, the big things such as buildings have their own history and lives. Old movie theaters, churches, broken down buildings,  I love looking at the different architecture. I think the older a building gets the more character it builds. In that way buildings are very much like people! I usually take a different approach to this theme however. Less realism and more realistically conveyed textures and strokes. You can make something FEEL like it's real without rendering every little detail as long as you include enough detail to give a hint of each thing.

Basically my themes are objects and people with their own history and background. I like to convey that history through the portraits and drawings I do. While that is my theme now I can't say that that theme will carry on throughout all of my work. College is where you begin to figure that all out, it's why we take classes! The classes to me aren't just assignments, they are meant to push our boundaries. The classes I take now push me way out of my comfort zone! Not only do they do that but they are also constantly teaching me new methods and new ways to approach projects. I have been trying to stray from my meticulous nature and be a little more expressive when I paint, letting myself loosen up a bit! Not only that but I feel like my style is constantly changing because of all that I am learning here! SO, while my themes pretty much stick to these three areas, I feel that this kind of thing, themes and styles, they are constantly changing.

Systems

So the world has been a bit crazy as of late! I have finished a few projects but a midst the madness I hadn't had time to update here and so here we go with post one of the update posts. The self portrait drawing is finished, the version I'm posting here is my mostly done version, I did tidy things up after and will edit this post once I get a chance to take a picture of my latest version. The drawing was done completely with charcoal pencils and vine charcoal.

 This next piece is actually just a mock up of a current project I am doing for my Drawing Observation and Invention course but I'm really REALLY excited about it! The assignment was to take a portrait of someone well known, famous really, and to draw/paint the portrait of that person but create your own system to accomplish that. The goal is to be able to think out of the box, use materials in unconventional ways and have fun with it! My individual that I chose to do a portrait of is Sally Ride, the first American Woman astronaut and a pioneer in multiple aspects of her life. Through my research of her I came across several things that were interesting. Much of her private life was kept very personal up until her death this past summer, but a lot of what you find when you search Sally Ride in any search engine are her programs for kids. She co-wrote 6 children's books on space with the aim to attract more children to science as well as creating Sally Ride Science which helps to supply schools with supplies for science classes and holds many programs for children. This aspect of her intrigued me, her love of children was one of the aspects of her life that wasn't hidden. So I proceeded with that thought and out came this mock up! I used the foot of a buzz light year action figure to create this portrait. The final will be MUCH larger in scale and probably atop of thousands of stickers or pages of her children's books I haven't decided yet...but here is what I have so far!

I will post up on Sunday once the final is finished with pictures of the final process and how it all turns out. As for any other projects! Still working on my current 3D project, that will be up in the next week including processing pictures and a detailed blog post on the horrors of plaster and how to fix the mess! I am still working on my water color in illustrator, which is coming along slowly but surely. People were right, you either love Illustrator or you love Photoshop! I Am finding I am quite the Illustrator fan, I just like the way it feels like I'm still creating my own work, painting on the computer but with more precision.

Anyways, tomorrow will be filled with more painting! More painting and another blog post or two! Goodnight blogger world.

Admiration

Lately I've had to look at artists for more than one of my courses. This blog post is part of an assignment for digital but the artist that I am going to be writing about is one that I've been researching for my upper level writing about art course! Funny how things work like that sometimes!

Anyways, this artists name is Walton Ford and he has rapidly become one of my favorite artists. This isn't just because of the skill in which he manipulates his materials, it is largely because of the multitude of meanings that his paintings hint at. At first glance it just seems that the subject matter in each work is an animal of some sort, or a grouping of animals. When looked at closely however these large scale water color paintings tell a different story. These paintings have details the satirize colonialism's history as well as the impact of slavery and other political subjects. Some images contain folktales, jokes, and high brow lessons in colonial literature! The key to understanding these slants and metaphors is in deciphering the clues he has included with the animals in the paintings. He says that his work contains animals in human culture, animals within the human mind.

This first image is from his exhibition "Bestiarum". It does an excellent job visually explaining his whole concept of animals in human culture. Here we have a group of monkeys, the closest thing genetically to human beings, fighting over table scraps and generally creating a big mess in the process. There are monkeys sitting on the table eating, sneaking food from the others, there is even one monkey who appears to be reading as he sits in a chair at the head of the table. Parts of this are very humanistic, such as the monkey reading the paper. Other parts show a much more animalistic nature which I believe comments on the unrefined side of human beings. The table manners get more and more out of control as you go down the table and see they are literally ripping off the table cloth and knocking each other over!

I like this image because of that mix between humanity and wilderness. The pillar in the background with the terrace make this seem like a more refined setting which completely offsets the chaos at the dinner table. Most of the colors he uses are earthy with the exception of the table cloth which stands out sharply against the tan and brown and green seen throughout the rest of the painting. Also, the fact that this was done in water color is astounding to me. I have always had a bit of trouble with water color. My paintings turn out nicely but they don't look like I've used watercolor because I don't use them the way they should be used. Water colors are suppose to be layered over and over and I don't have the patience. I just go. Sometimes I might have a couple layers here and there of color but usually I just go at it and what happens happens! So it never fails to impress me when I find an artist who can use water color to this extent.

The second painting I've chosen is one titled Nila. Very obviously it is a painting of an elephant! The musculature of the elephant seems true to its living counter part. Even the textures of both hide and ivory are fairly realistic. The one thing that strays from realism is the enormity of the beast. It's size seems to be exaggerated by the surrounding birds and even the ground that it stands on. The elephant stands a lone giant in a world filled with small feathered mammals. The background is understated, just an off white sky set above cracked brown dirt with hints of grass peaking up here and there. The work is also divided in a unique way. Each different species of bird is separated from the others by being placed in its own specific box within the piece. It is as if each is its own composition within the greater composition of the elephant.

As for the hints that make this painting more than just an illustration of different mammals! The elephant, who could be a symbol for India or Africa seeing as that their Native territory, is being swarmed by all of these different species of birds. However, none of those birds are the type that one would normally see picking flies and other bugs off of the hide of the elephant. They are birds that would be found in the west, and in effect they are parasites. This could in turn suggest that the west has become a parasite to lands such as India and Africa. These small details create a story and are why I love his work so much.

The third and final image that I've chosen of Walton Ford's is called Falling Bough. Here again there are a multitude of birds. At the forefront you can actually discern one bird from another to an extent, keeping in mind that this image is much much larger than it appears! The farther back into the image you get however the birds become much less apparent and the focus becomes this roiling turmoil of motion. The whole image gives off a distressed feeling, even the small branch seen in the left hand corner of the image is broken off. The colors of the image are all mostly dark and subdued with the exception of the few birds distinguished in the foreground helping to carry the fallen bough of the tree.

This image was mainly about the artists disgust with enormous number of passenger pigeons that use to populate the planet. He blames the birds in this case, making them the destroyers of the tree branch that they have broken under their weight. He emphasizes that as they carry away the bough they continue their constant bickering and picking and fluttering about without a care in the world as to what they are destroying in their path. As I had mentioned the branch in the corner also appears to be broken, at closer glance it is evident that the artist has also carried out his theme in this small area of the painting by placing a bird on the broken bough. The branches are again being broken by the weight of the pointless nattering birds.

These are just a few of my favorites of the images that Walton Ford has come up with. They impress me in color, size, and accuracy as well as in meaning. Many of these paintings are over 18 feet tall! Sometimes I feel I don't look into other artists often enough and his work has proven to me how much that has to change! 

Anywho, I will post later about the online project as well as some sketch book ideas etc. I'm hoping to have the online project finished tonight! See you later blogger land!