Showing posts with label class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label class. Show all posts

Monday, March 21, 2011

Life is a Collage

Pick out all of your favorite experiences, memories, colors, items, images, and feelings. Adhere them all in a pretty fashion on a stiff piece of, well, anything. That's collage for you. The freest type of art form there is!
Here are some excellent collages I've found.



1: unstrung65.deviantart.com | 2-3: doyveyant.deviantart.com



This one was done by my old drawing instructor, Sarah Dillon. On the older version of her portfolio website (http://www.sarahdillonstudio.com/) she mentioned me in the description of this piece. This is because I brought in a HUGE box of antique photos, newspaper clippings, papers, notes, and letters. ($10 at an antique store-- SCORE!) I shared the materials with the art class for our warm-up activity. Everyone was pretty jazzed about the whole thing, and even Sarah was pretty excited about it! Then, to my surprise, years later, I find this piece on her website. I'd remember that silly baby with the widow's peak anywhere. It warms my heart to see that a great artist such as Sarah Dillon would be so inspired by my gift to the class. :)

Here's one of my newest collages as well.

White bats are one of those critters that seem to follow me around. One of my oldest pieces that I still treasure is my albino bat, done in about 2007. Then, at Emerald City ComiCon (amazing as usual) I bought a handmade Honduran white bat figure!I was so captivated by the artist's skill and appreciation for such an obscure species of animal. (More of her cute dolls here: skinhorsedolls.deviantart.com) And then Pokemon Black/White came out, and the new pokemon Woobat and Swoobat are totally Honduran white bats and I don't care what you say.
So, I couldn't ignore the white bat's encroachment on my life. I needed to paint him. And thus it was.

It feels so good to be doing art again. For a while, my art block was miserable. I feel like I'm slowly picking my way out of it. :)

Sunday, June 6, 2010

When I Photograph My Art, I Hold My Breath

Sorry for the slow updates! I'd like to pull a classic college student move and blame finals for my inactivity. Thank you, thank you.
Here are my final art pieces. They're badly photo'd, cropped terribly, and the colors are a bit yellowed: but it's better than nothing and it's all I have to share at the moment. Well, unless you'd like to read my book review of Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh, but I highly doubt that. So on to the art!

Here we have a weasel woman and a snake man. That is all I shall say on this piece.

This piece is actually my final-final. However, I like my other piece better...

This piece: Ant-Woman and Teapot-Head Moth! I do enjoy psychedelic garbage like this every once in a while. That and pastels + smooth paper + layers of colors = epic love.

I do believe this calls for more Teapotmoths and Antwomen. They're too much fun to draw! With every piece I do I fall more and more in love with soft chalk pastels.

I shall update again close to Friday: when I am FREE! Free from finals. Won't that be lovely. *mind wanders, daydreams*

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Another Day, Another Art Dump

And by "art dump" I mean "hey let me talk at you about some of my drawings lol".


First on my list is this piece. You must know by now that I often dive into art without a preconceived thought or plan, so things turn out like this.
See, there's a maned wolf, a Japanese woodblock print of waves, street signs, and a cat with records. Make sense of it. I dare you.
The whole reason for this collage was a) I found some cool images in a newspaper and cut them out and b) I hadn't done a collage in a long time. It sort of evolved into this odd conglomeration of imagery. It is totally open for interpretation: when I thought about it more in depth, I decided to name it "California". The waves, bright colors, street signs, street-art inspired cat, and playful sunny disposition of the maned wolf made me think of that carefree, summery atmosphere associated with California.


Here's the story behind this guy.
Every day when I arrive at my college campus, I pass the ceramics department building. The campus is very green and woodsy, so the ceramics building is crawling with trees and little patches of leaves. There's a pile of these beautiful, very rustic and old-looking bricks out back, which I am strangely drawn to. (Haha get it, "drawn"?) I always pass the bricks, all nestled underneath tree branches and white speckled leaves, and I think to myself, man I'd love to paint that sometime. Well today, our model for class didn't show up, so we went outside to draw. It was good fun, I always love a change of scenery, especially when the weather is sunny and warm.
I'm normally all sorts of terrified drawing anything vaguely square-shaped and three dimensional, so at first I was a bit hesitant with my pastel drawing of bricks. But the thing with pastels is that you just have to keep going. When you think that all is lost and your drawing is terrible and you'll never be an artist and you'll retire to the mountains to herd goats for the rest of your life because you can't draw... just KEEP. GOING. (And cancel your rush-order of goats.) Pastels are very forgiving. The more you do, the better it gets.
That aside, I came up with this drawing out of a pile of bricks. Because of the half-finished clay sculpture of a demon head on the pile of bricks, I included it, too: only I added some crazy hands and a tail. God forbid I draw something normal. Honestly.


It is a well-known fact among my friends and family that I am never farther than 10 feet away from my sketchbook. I draw all the time. This habit is especially handy when you're stuck at Les Schwab waiting to have your car's tires rotated. I sketched myself a quick little slindragon, then wondered what I was to do after that. I had no colors, no pens, no nothing-- save for my pencil. And by then I was too art-ADD to keep sketching. So I got up, poured a cup of complementary coffee, took a sip, gagged, grabbed a stir straw, and sat back down. Using the straw I placed the coffee on the paper like I would with watercolor paints. I attracted the attention of a woman passing by; she thought it was the coolest thing that I was painting with a straw and cheap coffee. We chatted a while (turns out she knew Rob, my old art teacher) and I ended up giving her one of my business cards. Cha-ching!

I suppose that is all, for now.
Thanks for reading, hopefully your eyes aren't bleeding at this point. Thumbs up!

Friday, April 30, 2010

Look Left, Look Right

Ah yes, here we have your typical college art class assignment: drapery.
Aaauuurrrrgh drapery. I have never ever drawn anything that I get lost in so completely.
"Wait, ok, so there's this fold, and that fold, which turns into this crease, and wiggles around down there... wait, where am I? What did I just draw? WHAT AM I DOING HERE *PANIC*"
Yeah, not so fun. ... Except when my teacher is awesome and includes a deer skull! So of course I had to make that the focal point of our two projects on drapery. There is now a well-established running joke about my extreme adoration for animal skulls. I am so fine with that.
And here they are, done on 18"x24" black paper.

Also in the still life were two fashion mannequins and a skeleton, all three of them wrapped in fabrics. We had looked at some past student examples of pieces done of the mannequins and skeleton before that. In the drawings, Skeleton always seemed to be draping his arm over the very feminine Mannequin, sporting that signature skeletal grin. One of the other students and I made up stories about how Skeleton and Mannequin got together, got in fights, broke up, and later about how Skeleton was a stalker and always tried to woo Mannequin by singing lounge music to her... all based on the drawings of past students.
Art class is good fun, I am always, always happy to go. I think everyone needs to have an "art class" in their life: something they can always look forward to, something they enjoy regardless. It makes life much easier to live.
What's your "art class"?