For this project we worked with clay (well it's called a clay tile, isn't it?) to make a tile inspired off of one of the biomes we researched. My project is based off of an aquatic biome; more specifically a koi pond. I thought it would be a colorful and fun thing to do for my project. Building the rock was extra fun too since you can put all kinds of textures into it instead of making it a really smooth and boring stone. I mean I don't have anything against smooth stones but they'd be really boring to sculpt in my opinion. For the fish I used one of those loop tools to carve in the scales and a needle tool to carve in the eyes and the details on the fins.
For painting we used acrylic paint. I tried my best to add as much value to this as I could. I tried to add some light to the leaves and lily pads and a little shine on the rocks. I also brightened up the ripples in the water a bit and added some shadow underneath the objects like the fish, leaf, lily pads, and the rock. Along with adding some light on the rock I tried my best to shade it a bit as well.
This project was sort of a challenge for me. I've done printmaking before in middle school but it's been a few years. The most challenging thing was trying to find inspiration on what I would do for this project. I didn't want something plain or too complicated. At first I wanted to do a reptile, fish, or something that has a lot of texture. I didn't want to do a mammal because I don't have much experience carving or even drawing fur. Then I thought that maybe I should do an insect and tried to remember some ones I thought were cool. So at that point I was leaning between a stag beetle and a goliath beetle. The goliath beetle was a lot more fun to draw out and carve anyways so I'm really glad I went with that choice. Trying to come up with a background was pretty hard too. I don't know how I came up with it but I guess I kind of decided to put in a brick wall. Maybe because when trying to find inspiration it felt like I had hit a brick wall. whoa man that was deep i didn't even think of it like that until now
Carving out the linoleum was pretty fun too. It felt weird but cool carving it out. I think I've worked with linoleum before but I can't remember exactly what it was for. Another challenge involved actually printing the project. Again, it's been a few years since I've printed anything using something other than an actual computer printer, and I'm not the best at aligning things without accidentally dropping it in the wrong position, smudging ink everywhere, not putting enough ink on it, and just plain royally screwing up everything. But despite that I think they turned out pretty good and I like them a lot and it was a fun project. Some of this was sort of inspired off of a dream I had about some sky islands which was probably due to me marathoning Steven Universe, and playing a lot of Skyward Sword. Also I stare at the sky a lot at night. The ideas I got at first for this project were related to the sky, forest, and sea. In the end I tried to combine the ideas of the sky and sea, which brings us to this weird sky civilization that lives in colorful houses on floating chunks of rock (or giant sky whales), travels by sail boats (or giant sky whales), and make friends with the sky fish (or giant sky whales) that live with them.
During the project I kind of goofed off a bit and imagined that there would be a giant sky whale some weird old man built his house on for some reason, but no one really questions it. I wanted the timing to take place in the evening/night when you can see the stars and planets, but it'd still be bright enough to see and there would be colors in the sky. I put in a lighthouse as well so then the ships could navigate themselves at night. I also thought about putting in some eels and scary-looking fish to try and give the place a sense of adventure. For this project I used mainly watercolors, I didn't have any acrylic paint and I would get impatient and sloppy if I used only color pencils. Watercolors were a lot more fun to use and it came out a lot better. I did use some color pencils in order to highlight some of the colors and enhance them a bit. In this project I tried to align the perspective with the islands, sailboats, clouds, etc. Some clouds may overlap islands, some islands look a bit more distant along with the sailboats, and you can even see a bit of the surface of the earth through a crack in the clouds. For this assignment we had to choose 2 cartoon characters (I did Bill as an extra for fun) and create a skeleton for them. I'm not used to drawing skeletons so this was a little hard for me; especially the rib cage. What we did was trace the outline of the character on wax paper (I just drew the outline because it was easier for me) and drew the skeleton inside the outline. We had to follow certain rules such as making sure that they had a similar skeletal structure to the human skeleton (or if they did an animal, one similar to their animal's structure, or maybe even both!) We were allowed to include extra things that would help us tell which character it was. For Sugilite I drew her gem, her glasses, teeth, and her extra eyes and arms; for Kanaya I kept her horns and teeth; and for Bill I kept his hat and bow tie.
These are a few designs that didn't quite make it to the final project. There's a few more on my laptop I'll upload later. We're working on Matisse inspired artwork in class using only black and white. This is sort of inspired off of a dream I had. |
Spring 2015 |