Monday, June 9, 2014

Art 1 Final Portfolio


This is a redone animal that I had to make up around the beginning of the year, I had created the "Mikano rat", the one on the left is the before picture, and the one on the right is the redone picture. As I was in this class I had learned more about dimension and shading. On the left, it shows that the picture is very one-dimensional and flat, with very plain design, on the right it has more dimension and shading which makes it pop out more.My skills had definently gotten better with this class by looking at how different the two works are. I had been drawing outside of art as well which has helped my skill and especially with detail.

 A media that I had a lot of fun with this semester was Oil pastels. I really liked it because you could blend it so well and it felt very smooth, almost like crayon, The works ive created with oil pastels is the work "condemned to the ground" which is above. I really like the techniques and burnishing, and if I make an error then I could cover it up by adding more layers because oil pastel are so opaque. And in the background I used the "Scumbling" technique which gave it a very unique texture, and how it really stands up on its oil. Oil pastel were very nice to use.




. My most successful project, in my opinion, was my Identity Project. The project is supposed to be what goes on in my mind most of the time when i'm daydreaming, or dreaming in general. The media I had used was markers and pens which is my favorite media. I picked this project as my most successful because it shows most of my skill, especially with  colouring and style. It has the most characters and took me the longest time to do. I am very proud of this work and it is just so important to me. Its a very big picture, almost a poster, and having something represent me(my mind) means a lot.



A project where I had the most obstacles was the stamp project. I have a lot of trouble understanding and doing this project, mostly because in my mind it was very complicated. I wasn't very used to a media where I had to form and carve something 3 dimensional, and it was coming out very sloppy. Most of the problems came with the coloring and stamping, I had no understanding of how to color it correctly, and when I had stamped everything on yellow paper, I had to cut that out and glue it to blue paper. Eventually I had gotten the final project out.




 The way I challenged myself to be a better artist was with trying something other than my usual style, I've attempted to try realism multiple times and it didn't always work out because the style would always come out someway cartoonish. But I've decided to mix it up with cartoon style so it's kind of halfway. I had challenged myself to try a new style, the picture above is my first attempt at realism which was "OK" at best. I will definently work on that in the future. :)
 This was the summary of my semester.




Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Blog Post 5

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This picture is a big mish mosh of my mind, also  known as the "Identity Project". I had to do something that was about me, in this work, i have me(bottom left corner) and to my left, there is an explosion of characters and color that expresses what I imagine in my mind. The way my own ideas are in this work is that all of the characters and character designs to the right are all people that I have made up and either wrote/imagined of. This shows how the artwork is about me in the way that its showing my story characters and how my imagination works, bright and colorful. It shows my love for "Japanese Anime" and all of the stories I have imagined. The challenges were that my markers that I used kept on drying on me, and they were expensive markers, so I started to use crayola markers and colored pencils. I used to have a big word at the bottom but it didn't fit very well, so I came up with the idea to cover it in tissue paper. This artwork, titled "Think", is most likely one of my favorites. Mostly because it shows who I am.





In this project, which I like to call the Make a stamp project", is basically carving and making a stamp. I learned how to carve a specific materical to make a stamp-like object, and I could use different paints and colors to stamp it on paper. I've always been fascinated with skulls, especially punk-skulls, so that's where my inspiration came from. I wanted to make it my own so I gave it a twist and used two colors that are usually very girly together, pink and yellow, and made them look like a danger/punk style. I admit that I at first had a bunch of trouble understanding how the process worked, especially with the coloring. Those were my complications and bumps in the road. This piece is called "Danger stamps".








This artwork is my second favorite, for a "change" project. I had to express change for this assignment and I had gotten this idea. It is intended to show how dramatic events can change one's life drastically, using a future Olympic runner and putting him into a supposed "car accident". On the left is the man, all happy and training for a marathon in his jogging gear, on the right is the man after his hinted car accident(look at the frame on the wall). I normally do tragic things that make people sad. I know, I am a horrible person, but I enjoy expressing those feelings that people sometimes need to do. How I put myself into this is the thing I feel most proud about, the sad elements in my stories. I have had a bunch of help from my friends, when the teacher announced the change project, my friend knew what I was thinking anf said it aloud. "death" , yes I know, drastic, but I really was thinking that, and then later my friend said "Maybe you shouldn't do death, but almost." That's how I got my idea, they had given me the idea to not go with the usuual(Death) and try something different. This artwork is called "Big change"







Thursday, April 17, 2014

Blog Post 4

My class has been doing much ever since my last blog post, here's what to catch up on:

A Farewell to My Beloved Studio Ghibli.
          Ever since I was a little girl, Studio Ghibli movies have been my life.And when I found out that it was ending, I decided, why not make something for them? This was my style project, and it's supposed to show how I was a fan of this type of thing, animation. It shows that I will miss their worlds and stories, in this picture I'm holding various references to my favorite movies of theirs. Bottom line, It shows that this is what I love.

     My source for inspiration definitely came from Hayao Miyazaki himself, that, and the whole Japanese culture. I find their style so unique and so different that I could not help but draw it. In this picture, I took
the characters from some of his movies and fit them in with, myself. Yes, the girl with the red hair is me,
and i'm supposed to be holding "Heen" from Howl's Moving Castle, The mouse and the bird from Spirited Away, the forest spirit from Princess Mononoke,  and the hat from The Wind Rises. Since my inspiration came from Hayao Miyazaki, I had to do the style, and it was not very easy. Mostly because his style is so different from the regular anime style that it's hard to recreate.

There were two problems that occurred while I worked on this, the eyes, and the markers. Studio Ghibli's style does not include the eyes being seen under the hair, and that is a style I am most familiar with. So when I made the eyes visible under the hairm I used white-out to cover it up, but when I went over the white-out with my markers, It came out sloppy. I thought it would not work, but I soon fixed the problem. The other problem was the fact that I was using copic markers for a very big picture. And they could have dried out in the process, thank goodness they didn't.


A Very Boring Man.
This was my emotion project, meant to convey a very boring emotion using greys and whites and blacks. It was intended to show something like a very boring teacher that has a mustache and somewhat bald head. I used really dark colors,plain and just boring. The guy look unapealing as well, you can't see any expression or life in him, that's what I was trying to convey, pure boredom.
Every once in a while i'd ask my friends what they thought, or what patterns and colors I should have put in the picture.They really helped me throughout this project and I might have not gotten the idea without them.
I definitely was not sure about the decided emotion itself. Was boring really an emotion? Sure I could express it in a picture but is it really necessary? All of that went throughout my head, but I did it anyway. And people liked it! That seemed to be the only problem other than me not being the best at painting.


This was a class warmup, I had to create my own creature so i created, the MIKANO RAT.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Blog Post 3

      As close to realism as I'll ever get.
The title is true, yes, I will barely ever try and aim for realism. This unique style i've chosen is a mix of cartoon, and ALMOST realism. For inspiration of this face, I had to look at one of my anime character drawings, and imagine her as a real person, which was very difficult. I had to combine the two styles which definitely was not easy either.
      Many times I had to just stop and look at it, did it look too cartoony? Did I ever need to put more shading to give it more of a real look? Those questions were what I asked myself most of the time, before I tried my ideas for this weird face, I had to imagine how it would look at first. That;'s what worried me.
       The new techniques I learned mostly had to do with the realism parts and shading, I learned to make the nose and under eyes shading. With the facial shape being mroe real that cartoon, I had included things I am mostly familiar with, like the eyes or eyebrows, thin eyebrows and large, shiny eyes.


       An angel condemned to the ground.
This project's theme was Land or Sky? And me being myself, took the theme both ways.(not knowing that you had to actually pick either land or sky for the project.) I came up with this, which is pastel are of an angel with black wings, and the roots of the ground are keeping him bound to Earth.  At first I was very nervous at the use of pastels, I had barely ever used them and wasn't sure how the whole picture would come out. For me, pastels were too sticky and soft, I also was not able to draw a face and eyes with the pastel's blunt tip.
      For this picture, I had found inspiration from myself this time. I had used my own original idea and executed it on paper. The only thing that I had used other than my own idea was a reference for trees and vines that had to be looked up on the internet.
      This artwork was supposed to show and say that not a lot of my art is all smiles and giggles. Naturally I do art more from a negative or dark perspective, such as the ground not letting an angel fly, keeping him on the ground. I write stories  that also have dark themes, so this ties into that as well. Through my artwork, I am examining the issues that have to do with the choppy looking background, for the background, I chose chalk pastel instead of oil pastel.
      The Big Black Hole
This art project's theme was Space. At first I had a little bit of trouble coming up with something to match that theme. But when I had gotten home, I found inspiration from my favorite game Kingdom Hearts, which involves small dark minion-like creatures called "heartless". The way I had made it unique was by adding some of my own features and style into it, such as a black hole chest and puppet-like skull head.
      This artwork was intended to show that I have a bit of a strange imagination, this monster being what i titled as "Lord Of Space". My personal interests involve creating monsters like this, large, deadly, and somewhat disturbing, this picture adds to my collection of chimeras, chupacabras and just beasts overall.
       I definitely was not sure about this projects, mostly because I didn't know if it would look like space, so here and there I had to add stars and planets just to make sure. I find it risky that I chose this strange monster as the main part of my space imagination, I;m not usually used to science fiction or space, It's not exactly my forte. I stick to Fantasy but this artwork helped me. 

Blog Post 2




      These are various sign languages that we have to draw in art class. For these, I had to look at my hand while drawing it down, my ideas at first were to not make the hands look too real( I cant do that anyway), my style usually sticks to the cartoony and surreal side of art, so even though the hands may have wrinkles and all five fingers, the style is based on anime, with thin fingers.
      For the H, I had used my Manga outlining pen 08 and prismacolor markers eggshell, and putty. Which is what I normally use for coloring and is the first time I've used them in this class. these materials are very familiar for me in the way of using them, I've gained some skill with using them.(yet i'm pretty sure one of them is starting to run out.) 
      These hands were also made to show my style of art. Not completely realism, but not completely cartoon-like. hand H is the only one with color in it, which made me use less hand wrinkles, because in most anime styles, they use the shading to show dents or wrinkles skin or objects. The other two do have drawn wrinkles, because my natural style is not defined by shading.


Blog Post 1

My class Object drawing of a pokeball

      I've always been a fan of pokemon so I tried m y best to put my own style into it. The communication is supposed to be about the video game franchise that has become super popular, pokemon. Ever since I was little I've played it, so when I got the chance to draw a pokeball, why not?
      I learned how to shade the picture to make a certain part look hollow. This was very new to me and I wasnt sure if it was really going to work. It was also kind of risky for me to draw the red light coming from the object, because I didnt know how it would really look.
      My friend convinced me to bring my item to school, so if it wasn't for her, I would've brought poptart. In terms of collaberation, yes, my friend is a fan of the pokemon franchise as well, and she helped me out with terms of color choice and shading.

One of the first art projects for my art class, a Zentangle including various video game references.
     This artwork is about me in the way that I've always been a fan of video games, and wanted to put it all onto a piece of paper. It is intended to show and make the viewer feel some sort of Nostalgia because most of the references are classic video games. This piece of art is my view of video games and tells alot about the kind of person that I am.
      In terms of collaboration, I had to ask my friends multiple times for ideas of video games to put into the picture. Most of my inspirations came from them. Without their help I definitely wouldn't have been able to come up with as many references in this picture.
      The issues I had mostly had to do with "Did it even look like a zentangle"?I wasn't sure about the theme choice and thought it was rather dumb, I would color things wrong out outline a circle very sloppy, and I would work around it. For me this was a bit risky since It doesn't necessarily look like a zentangle at first, but I made sure to add some patterns within other shapes inside the zentangle.

A 2-in-1 drawing, Frog and Man combined.
       For this drawing, I decided to use my own design of a frog and my own style.  Hopefully making it as original as I can, the only thing I looked up on the internet for reference was a blue frog, everything else was my own design. Some Ideas I used were inspiration off of movies made by Hayao Miyazaki, ex. Spirited Away, a movie that involves a lot of humanoid animals.
      I had to use a new technique of mixing marker, crayon, and color pencil. I learned how to shade in a different way and that using marker as a shade is very effective. At first i didn't know that this technique would work.
 This piece was not intended to say anything at the start, It was making a man and a frog. This artwork shows that my style may be different , including how I draw animals.Though I definitely was not sure if people would know that it was a frog,mostly because it might not look like one to other people.