fini!

today i feel finished. after i re-did the eyes, it looked a little bit more like me.

someone was looking at it when i was working on it and said, “that doesn’t look like you. but it does.” : ) i couldn’t agree more. it’s definitely not how i think of myself, but that isn’t the point. it’s what you SEE, not what you think of yourself. so yes, i think that i was able to finish well.

i worked a lot on the eyes, a few details on the neck, tried to lighten it up more, and especially the nose. nell pointed out that the nose looked like it caved in because of the shading. i couldn’t have agreed more, so i definitely changed that. overall, i loved this project. it might have been my favorite because of the time i spent on it compared to the others. it’s like a mother: she will always love her baby the most, and this portrait was my “baby” of the semester. bad metaphor, i know, but i’m obviously burnt out from studying for these finals. goodbye for now.

rainy saturday

today, the weather was very dull. it rained almost the entire day and it looked like nighttime when i was working on my portrait. i had originally expected not to have much left to accomplish today, but i should have known better : ). i began by perfecting my face, making it lighter, and i also added detail around my face. i’m not so sure about my hair… that part was very hard. then nell pointed out that my eyes were unproportional to the rest of my face. so i blacked out the eyes. but then i got really hungry and realized that lunch was about to end. so, it may not seem like i did much, but i feel like i can see the difference. also, as i am getting closer to finishing, i am backing up and looking at the portrait from far away too. here are some pictures of today’s work:

these eyes look really strange hahahaha

this is where i stopped today : P but with more energy and food in my stomach, i’ll finish them next time!

winding down…

the semester is winding down. i’m updating now because we only really have one class this week, which was yesterday. tomorrow is SpARC! i am presenting and feeling a bit nervous, but i’m ready!

this post will come with a story… last friday, i spent most of the day outside because the sunshine was so beautiful. however, i deeply regretted that this past weekend, during which i spent in a lot of pain and mainly covering my face with cold washcloths. on monday morning, before class, i hopped on marta after making an emergency appointment with my dermatologist, and he informed me that i had first degree burns on large areas of my face which was a reaction between the sun and the acne medicine that he prescribed to me in january. the reason i’m blogging about this is because, truthfully, monday’s class was a little emotional. i hadn’t really allowed myself to look in the mirror this weekend because i knew it’d make me upset: burning my skin scares me, especially since i care so much about it. so, on top of the pain, i was forced to stare at my face in the mirror, but i think that made me stronger. after that, i began to accept how i looked and realize that it’s going to heal and go away.

as for my progress during class, i am extremely excited. i feel like i have really begun to understand how to form my face by erasing and thinking about the values that make it possible to do this. i worked up to my right eye, and then down to one side of my top lip. i’ve added some pictures of my progress! i truly can’t wait to go back and continue working!

portraits, hanging, opening

it’s been about one week since i last updated. since then, we worked on our self portraits and prepared for the annual student exhibition.

i am feeling very pleased thus far with my self portrait! i didn’t line up the eyes completely correct the first time, but nell was a wonderful help and opened my eyes to true proportions, which have been challenging. using the string method in the mirror is complicated because of the reflection. i am trying my best to focus on very small places and move to the next by contrasting the values of shade and lightness. it’s been working much better than my original outlining approach.

after wednesday’s class, we all went downstairs to hang up our chairs on the wall. it was important to space everything evenly. we started by measuring the length of the room. then, since there were 18 pictures, we found the middle and 9 were placed on either side. i really like how they are arranged – one chair begins, and then as you move your eyes to the right across the wall, the chair appears to be spinning. since nell had already given us a plan of how to arrange the chairs, i found it pretty easy. however, i have noticed the placing in museums, and it’s so precise and always looks wonderful. i once watched a short film about the louvre during one of my visits to the high. the curators stood in front of these massive paintings, just staring and considering how to arrange them. it was very interesting how they decided – size, color, frame, etc.

on thursday night, i went to the opening of the exhibition. i took a friend with me (lauren), and she enjoyed the work, but probably not as much as me : ) it’s so amazing to see my own work on the wall beside everyone else’s beautiful pieces. everyone seemed to really enjoy the animals. the porcupines were one of my favorites. a student in the other class had made them (avi). i also stayed around for the luchsingers, who did an amazing job as well!

i will add pictures next week! i haven’t gotten much farther than the nose/beginning of an eye… patience is a necessity in this class/ all art.

self portrait.

“do not outline!”

“darkest darks, lightest lights!”

what else did i hear? : ) they were all wonderful suggestions, but i still managed to begin by outlining. i think that when nell helped me and i walked through the different shades just on my nose, i began to understand. that was a tremendous help. i am really excited to see how this work turns out. i left dana covered in small black spots on me, but i love the evidence of art on a person.

this first picture shows how i outlined, and the last is the miracle that nell created within me just by discussing shading. i need to stop looking at the big picture and focus in on one area. i also need to erase what i SEE, not what my mind is telling me/ is used to seeing.

animal critique

these elephant peacocks were absolutely amazing. they were so abstract and definitely illustrated using “found objects”. things i really loved: how the female elephant/peacocks had the copper rings, the roughness of the bark against the smooth wire and then the craziness of the thread, but yet it all fit in so perfectly. our discussion about the elephants was amazing. i never knew that they returned to the grandmother after her death, so i think it’s great that the remains of the grandmother are included. the colors are beautiful; cool and calm. the sizes that separate the ages of the elephant peacocks is also wonderfully thought out. i am just altogether amazed at the simplicity and abstractness of these pieces, yet they are so complicated at the same time. can’t say enough about them… just wonderful.

tiny animals

this assignment, to create tiny animals, goes something like this:

tiny animals
thinking in three dimensions

design elements:
negative / postive shape (in space)
form
surface texture
color
scale (in this case all animals will be relatively “small”, but within each piece consider the scale of size of parts of the piece to the other piece)

materials: wire frames, sculpey and other found objects

project description:
create a fantastical or realistic animal (imagined or mimicked) that is endowed in three dimensions with elements of three dimensional form. (you may make more than one!)

your animal should be no larger than 8” in any direction and bigger than 1” in every direction.

you may use: wire, sculpey, glue, paper or any other objects you may find and collect to form your animals.

the unity of the project will come with the repetition of some elemental “animal essence” traits that will appear in each person’s figure. the piece will work as a whole, with 33 animals making up the “stable” of the piece.

in all aspects consider:

what are the essential elements that give your animal a spirit? how little is necessary to include? how much mass or definition is too much?
the element of surprise that makes looking at the piece from each side a varied and/or unexpected experience

artists in the powerpoint/lecture: alexander calder, mike kelley, pablo picasso, jeff koons, deborah butterfield

and this is my own process:

the work day in class left me with very little inspiration. i was not coming up with much of anything…

originally, i had intended to make an octopus…

but then, as i found the legs, decorated them, and smashed them into the stress ball,

i began to see this creation more as a jellyfish. i actually used the wire of the alligators to create a hoop around the stress ball and i covered the ball in glue to add the colorful paper i hole punched:

this is my jellyfish:

compared to a real jellyfish:

my element of surprise was meant to be the colorfulness of the inside – adding to the “spirit” of the jellyfish. i always picture them as being very colorful and playful as they bounce through the ocean water. also, i used tissue paper, attaching it to the metal hoop and covering the top, in order for the jellyfish to have less circular shape. the tissue paper also was meant to be a transparent element, similar to a real jellyfish.

this wasn’t the only jellyfish i created – i started over completely after the first one. i don’t like how “messy” the animal appears. i couldn’t shape it how i really wanted. after the critique, i realized that i was trying to be much too realistic in my creation, which i alwayyys tend to do. i was very excited about creating something abstract, but, especially after seeing the peacock-elephants, i wanted to go back and make this jellyfish much much much more abstract. i want it to not have a plain form, i want it to create more open dialogue and many more interpretations. i think that the “realness” definitely detracts from the finished product. people seemed to like my choice of gold and pink and the transparency element of tissue paper, which were all intended. however, i am going to continue to think about this animal and try to approach the project in other ways…

visual/verbal language.

in small groups of three or four people, we did an in-class assignment. the assignment: without looking at the back of the work, assign two words to two of the works on the board. discuss reasons (using ideas from the lecture two weeks ago) why this word works with this work. words include: scale, composition, proximity, number of elements, position of elements, shape, and color. my group was: shayla, shaa’ista, kylen, shantara, and i. the words included: intimate, exuberant, isolated, happy, sad, quirky, surprised, aggressive, passive, aloof, indifferent, unconcerned, afraid, disturbed, anxious, troubled, calm, serene, relaxed, agitated, restless, content, joyful, exuberant, ecstatic, gloomy, disheartened, and despondent.

here were the pieces that we chose to discuss:

for the top photo, we chose the words: surprised and exuberant. the white shape is very large and appears like it would continue off the sides of the page. it’s also white on black, which makes the feeling more extreme; rather than happy, it’s exuberant (filled or characterized by a lively energy). it’s also on a large scale and the white takes up almost all of the space. the actual word was ecstatic, if i remember correctly, which we had considered using.

for the bottom photo, our words were: troubled and isolated. the black square in the middle seems extremely isolated from all the business in the top left corner. it also seemed troubled because the shape, color, and size were much different from the other shapes in the corner. the shapes in the corner seem to blend in to one another, and the square is left alone. the gray background also gives this a more dismal appearance. this one didn’t have a word on the back, so i still don’t know what it actually was.

i really enjoyed making this visual/verbal language assignment. i especially like the simple, black and white appearance. it was great fun to guess at what word each work actually signified, even thought i wasn’t very good at guessing.

marta critique

we were asked to critique a fellow students work for the marta project.

i have chosen to critique suzy’s.

suzy’s marta project, “marta-arta”focused on murals and designs throughout marta stations. her pictures were great and each one seemed to relate to the other. she mentioned that her blue tape was somewhat unplanned, but when thinking of it from a certain perspective, the blue tape is good because that is normally the only type of tape that is allowed to be used when hanging things on public walls. however, i think taking away the white at the top, and not having it just as a rectangular poster, and using clear tape would be very beneficial. i found the tape somewhat of a distraction. i think it’d be great to use that tape in a different way, possibly as frames for the pictures, but i tended to look at the tape rather than her pictures.

also, i found my own critique very helpful. i received great feedback about my idea. some suggestions included to make the words about both my journey and about marta, just a combination of the two. also, to print it out like a real newspaper – i guess i could ask the profile where they print their newspaper! i think that’d be so neat! this project was very fun.

marta and materials.

we have our MARTA project due this week. i am very excited about the flexibility of this project! here is the assignment:

take a trip and make a book.
the subject of the book is as if it were a scrapbook of things that happened on your trip. the presentation of the book is a design object.
your trip can be one stop and a return (for example from decatur to east lake, get off take the return and return and be done) or it can be exhaustive (goal: hit every stop there is). the length of trip makes no difference!
use your camera and/or drawing skills and writing to create a catalog of the trip.
before you go! consider ways to unify your book in terms of a single design idea:
possibly you will make a book that consists of the most boring details you can conceive of (include images of the windowsill, the sidewalk, the smudgy window, the rail schedule). possibly you will include only things that are orange (images of cheese curls squished o the seat, an orange coat of a passenger, an orange drink).
once you have a design idea (which may start as one thing but end up as another, and may start before the trip and then transform completely once you begin to make the book), create an object where every decision you make about its production addresses the thematic concept. so if it is a book containing boring details, don’t decorate it with sparkly exciting material. what is the most plain presentation of the details? if it is about orange, well…perhaps it needs purple or green to set it off?
there is no set size, material or binding process. instead, it is up to you to make decisions that make sense.

also, my design in words:

i rode marta with the intention of capturing how people spend their time while waiting for the train and riding the train. i immediately noticed that besides head sets (which would be very hard to inconspicuously capture), many people chose to read a book, newspaper, or write in a journal. i took pictures of people while they were doing these actions. i was originally going to create a book with these images, but after seeing many people with newspapers, i decided to make a newspaper page instead. i began to do the outline of the design, placing the pictures, adding a title to the page, and small details. i was also originally going to write about my experience of marta as the newspaper articles; however, to make it more interesting, and more like “reading material”, i researched marta online, and wrote about marta’s history, fares, train lines, and even the weather. i also discovered that the ride marta day is soon – march 26th, in an effort to save marta, which is currently considering dropping an entire half of the bus services.

and here is my final project:

i also want to mention the correct materials and paper that i have used so far in the semester. i have been wrongfully stating what i’ve used.

the original chair, i used plain printing paper with pencil.

the in class chair was black vine (soft) charcoal on strathmore paper.

the one of planks and frames was red conte crayon on lenox paper.

the in class drawing used graphite and very thick paper.

the visual verbal word prject was gray, black, and white paper with exacto knives.

and my marta project was on white paper, not too thick, with printed photos, and black pen/marker.