Touch the Wall!

I recently finished my "time in art" project! I started the project brainstorming things that have to do with time: clocks, pendulums, sundials etc. I looked at things that change over time such as plants or food. 

Then I moved towards things that happen at certain times such as a sunrise or sunset or a snapshot of an event. About eight years ago, my brothers and sister and I were being too obnoxious so my dad sent us outside to play. It just so happened to be during a hurricane, but my siblings and I suited up and went for a walk around the neighborhood. A local newsman saw us walking and took our picture, we didn't know we had been photographed but later he pulled over and asked us what we were doing walking around during a hurricane. I like this picture because we were not positioned or posing for it, but it captures all of our characters; my brother is just enjoying it, catching raindrops, my older sister is leading the way, holding the umbrella, I am cautiously looking around, and my youngest brother is tagging along, not even under the umbrella. I thought this captured the idea of time in art because this was just a quick moment in time but it captures so much. 

 I am a swimmer and swimming is a sport that is completely based on time so I decided to focus on that. I messed around with my friend's GoPro and was able to get some cool screenshots from the videos I took. 

I selected a photo where my hands have just entered the water and I am lunging towards the wall. I really liked it because it captured the movement of the water with all the bubbles and light and dark spots. You can also see the black "t" in the background which marks where the wall is. This captures the essence of time because my hands are about to touch the wall but haven't yet. 

I sketched out the picture and like the composition but the pencil wasn't capturing the look of the water well. I decided to use oil pastels because I could blend them by using baby oil. This helped develop the texture of the water. 

Ta da!

FINISHED!

I have finally finished my text art project!

I finished attaching them to the book then used watercolor to give them a little color. I chose watercolor because it is more mellow and it is the same medium that is used in the cover art in the original Winnie-the-Pooh books. I wanted to keep the feel of E.H. Shepard's characters.

  I was really happy with how it turned out; however, some of the strips didn't glue down very well so if I were to do this again, I would spend more time covering the characters in the lines from the book.

working on the text art project...STILL.

I am finishing my text art project and SHOULD be finished in the next few days. I pasted the cut strips of the book onto each of the characters' bodies and that took a lot longer than I expected, but I finished! I have glued the characters facing each other on the open pages of the book, I liked this formation because it keeps the feel of the friendship that the characters have in the books. I am now laying the cut strips of the book across the bases of the characters to make them look like they are morphing out of the book. After this, I plan to put a little watercolor over each character to give it some color. It will not be very detailed, just a quick thin coat of paint in the character's color. 

Hooray, first text art project!

Dig Deeper:

For this project I created a Pinterest board and found a bunch of cool things that were related to Text Art. 

https://www.pinterest.com/clairew0173/text-art/ 



Two Challenges:

I liked how a lot of the art pieces I found created words out of iconic symbols/letters so I made my own! It incorporates a lot of websites we see and use "today".

I also really liked a lot of the blackout poems and I had never made one before so I found a cool page on space and had fun with that.

Where I'm at: 

I like how a lot of text art pieces incorporate layers and I really like the idea of using newspaper. I also really like books and those are similar to newspapers so I went off of that idea. For my final project I decided to make the characters from Winnie the Pooh (one of my favorite books) morph out of the pages of the book. Right now I am making the characters out of Sculpey and "paper mache-ing" words from the book onto their bodies. 

Questionable, scale, proportion

This projects theme was questionable. I thought of many things that are uncommon, or mythical. Some ideas were Chicken Little, Dumbo, Pinocchio, Godzilla, and aliens.

Then I went to impossible-seeming things such as a ship in a bottle and snow globes. Then I tried to think of things that are not commonly found in snow globes... like people! I decided to try to make a person trapped in a snow globe with their face and hands pressed up against the glass. The face and hand would be the focal point so I decided to make them bigger than the rest of the body.

Now the small person used scale, the difference in the size of the person's body used different proportions, and the idea of a person trapped in a snow globe was questionable. I really liked this idea but as I was developing it the snow globe idea fell through because of my lack of snow globes. The next best thing was a jar, some my idea changed again. The jar did not resemble a snow globe enough so then I tried to think of things in jars that could go with a person. Anything in a jar with a person would be questionable and fireflies are caught and put in jars! Because I made the limbs of the person with wire, the fireflies also were made with wire and some metal.

I liked the incorporation of the wire fireflies and the limbs of the man because it tied all the mixed medias together (clay, glass, and the yellow beads)

This was not as much a risky project, but more of a spontaneous one. Most days I did not know what I was doing and my plan changed multiple times. I was very fun though because I was able to experiment with clay, the solderer, and wire and sheets of metal. This was not my favorite project, but I did really enjoy working on it and experimenting with the materials so it was a good learning experience. 

Portrait Project

I chose to do my portrait of a Calavera or a Day of the Dead sugar skull. It is a craft that is done in Spanish- Speaking countries where children make little edible skulls out of sugar for el dia de los muertos. I however, did it a little differently. At first I sketched out the outline of the skull that I wanted to make. I then determined how high each of the point would be. By doing this I was able to stack the sugar cubes to create a rough base for the skulls. Once I had done that, I made a paste to fill in the gaps and make the face seem smoother. I used a mix of sugar, egg white, glue, and a little bit of water to make the paste. After letting this dry, I was able to use a Dremel (drutter) to carve out some of the parts and smooth out corners. This was a very tedious part of the process.

After finishing this I was able to go in and paint on the decorations. This was the most fun part and I really enjoyed using the bright, vibrant colors. At the end, I decided to mount it on a mirror. This was a portrait project so the mirror would make any observer look as if they had a sugar skull as a face.

This whole project was pretty much a risk. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The sugar was really hard to work with and I had no clue how it was going to turn out. Luckily, it all worked out okay.
This might have been my favorite project just because of the lack of limits. I had never worked with any of the materials before so there was no stress about perfecting them. By trying something new I was able to step out of my comfort zone and work with some crazy stuff.

Sticky Situation

Repetition

For the theme “sticky situation”, I first thought of things that are sticky, such as honey, syrup, glue, gum, etc. Then I went on a tangent about hard, difficult, or “sticky” situations such as the Great Molasses Disaster, or a car stuck in the mud. I decided the composition would look better if there were multiple little things rather than try to make repetition in a situation. So I went with a still life. I liked the gum stuck to a shoe idea, but repetition would be hard to incorporate, and gum packets and honey seemed too original so I went with maple syrup. The media I used was acrylic which worked really well for the syrup colors. I could mix the colors to match my references, and the colors also blended well, allowing me to show the highlights and lowlights in the syrup. The paint also dried relatively quickly so I could put a layer of paint on and move to the highlights all in one day. I also got to use the matte medium which allowed me to thin the paint a little, and help make the shadows more bendable. I really liked using this media, even though it was a risk I took in the project. It was hard to work with, and blend, but it made the different colors of the syrup a challenge. To incorporate repetition I did a still life with multiple bottles (3) each had a different shape and darkness which made it interesting, but they were all maple syrup bottles, creating repetition. The mini lessons also helped a lot during this project, because I learned how to add highlights and low lights without just adding white or black to the paint. I learned to add colors that are opposite on the color wheel to darken, and add a yellow, or lighter shade of a color to highlight. The bottle painting on the black paper help to teach me how to use the white as a high light, and the watercolor lesson helped with layering and incorporating in other colors.