Judgmental Giraffe is judging you

Luncheon on the Grass

This is my friend the giraffe.  Doesn't he look super judge-y? Mr. Sands told me he looked like the lady in Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass:

Yeah, she's totally naked.  But my blog is family friendly :))

"really? well fine then"

She is judging you so hard.  Like she has any right.
Anyways, that's why this piece is named "Luncheon on the Grass."
It's a pun too... lunchin' on the grass... get it? :))

Portfolio Presentation

portfolio

Mildly curious British bossy

I was flipping through a National Geographic, looking for pictures for a collage, when I happened across this photo.  I loved it so much, I just knew I had to paint it.

"With mild curiousity, three bossies look up from their grassy breakfast.  Their pasture lies behind a lush hedge bank in Cornwall bedecked with tiny red valerian, purplish ragged robin, and cream-colored sprays of wild chervil, locally known as cow parsley."

This photo was taken by Sam Abell as part of a story called "Britain's Hedgerows" in the September 1993 National Geographic.
I tore the picture out and promised myself I would paint it later.  I finally pulled it out again on one of those snow days.
I had a hard time copying the shape of the cow's head, so I projected my reference onto an 11x14" canvas I had painted red.  Somehow I'd forgotten that I'm afraid of the dark... I really don't love working with super dark values.  I was kind of in trouble.  Eventually, with the deadline looming, I sucked it up and painted myself a cow.
I knew I wasn't going to be able to copy the hedge in extreme detail, so I just kind of fudged it.  I tried to add some of the same textures and values without painstakingly copying every leaf, every blade of grass...  I think I have come a long way since I started painting ;)
Sorry for no in progress pictures...

Here she is... a mildly curious british bossy;)

The colors are a bit off, and you can't really see the values in the face, but you get the idea...

Artist behaviors:
1.  Artists Develop Art Making Skills - I probably wouldn't ever tell you that painting with really dark colors is one of my skills.  However, through this piece, I got a teeny bit better at that.  I kind of figured out how to paint using "pretty dark" and "really dark" instead of "light" and "medium" and "almost darkish."  I also got to work on using textures besides "fluffy" and "feathery," especially with the hedge.
2.  Artists Take Risks - I didn't quite realize it at the time, but it was a big risk for me to pick a little picture of a dark cow to make a big ole painting out of.  Once I realized how painful much work it would be, I decided not to give up because I really loved this cow.  I'm not comfortable working with black and almost black.  I still don't like using black paint to mix colors.  I got past that a little bit with this piece because I just dove into it without thinking about the "risks."
3.  Artists Solve Problems - I realized shortly after starting that I had a big problem... I tried and tried but I could not get the shape of the cow's head, especially her ears, onto the canvas.  I decided to project the image onto the wall, prop up my canvas and trace the cow onto it.  Then, I was having issues with the transparency of my paint.  I couldn't get the green of the hedge to look right where it overlapped the blue of the sky I had already painted or the black of the cow that had to be there for the shape of the grasses to look right.  With a whole lot of paint and a lot of random other colors mixed in, I finally got the green to cover what it needed to.

You can expect some more cows in the future :)

The floating city

For this project, we were supposed to make a piece inspired by the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an Austrian artist who painted stuff like this:

And built stuff like this:

the Hundertwasserhaus

I decided I wanted to paint a man in a boat with some buildings behind him.  Then I figured, what better setting than Venice? So I found some reference pictures of Venice.

I especially liked the colors of the buildings and the water on the upper left and the composition on the lower left.
I did a super basic sketch to give me an idea of what I wanted to do.  I thought underplanning would be better than overplanning... I have a tendency to overplan but lately I have been overcompensating for that... it might have been a bad idea, in retrospect, to plan so little.
Oh well!

a sketch... with secret code! kidding.  just mixing oranges

So I started by painting the whole thing blue, then painting some big orange boxes for buildings and adding some colors to the sky and water.

say... is that cheese??

Hundertwasser considered straight lines to be of the devil, but I had a hard time controlling myself and it got all perspective-y on me.

It ended up not looking as much like a Hundertwasser as I intended because my try-to-make-it-look-ok instincts kicked in and I had a really hard time letting it be imperfect with crooked lines and everything.  I decided to line the buildings in black, which is something I would normally never do but I think overall it enhanced the piece.

You & Me in the Floating City

Ta da!
Hundertwassery or not, I am happy with this one.  I am glad I chose to paint something besides cute fluffy animals...  I've been feeling lately like that's all I'm really capable of.
you&me in the floating city
Artist behaviors:
1.  Artists Create Original Art - For this project I drew inspiration from Hundertwasser's pieces and the lovely city of Venice, Italy.  I combined the colors and images of Venice with Hundertwasser's style to create a unique composition.  Elements of my personal style show through, especially in the little people :)
2.  Artists Take Risks  - This whole piece kind of felt like a big risk to me.  I suppose I could've made it feel less risky with a little more planning... I made myself make some choices that I normally would never make because I was attempting to embrace Hundertwasser's style, like the black lines and dark, crooked windows on the buildings.  I'm typically a careful painter, so I was very nervous throwing dark paint on my fabulous orange blocks of cheese buildings but I somehow got over myself and went for it.  I'm glad I did.
3.  Artists Have a Global Awareness of Artmaking - The reason I made most of the choices I did with this piece is because I was trying to draw inspiration from Hundertwasser.  I'm not certain exactly how successful I was in emulating his style, but it definitely influenced my choices and pushed me to take some risks.  I think it was good for me to get out of my (fluffy animals) box -- as a wise friend once told me, there is no growth in a comfort zone, and there is no comfort in a growth zone.

Cardinal

I spotted this pretty lady

just outside my window on one of those snow days a couple weeks back.  Since I've been painting animals, I really felt like I had to paint this bird, so my mom helped me take a couple pictures.  I love the colors of the cardinal against the snow.  Cardinals are such funny fat little birds, especially in the winter.
First I painted a 10x10" square canvas orange.  Then I started layering the background colors on, but since gray is boring, I made it purple instead.  Brownish is also a boring color, so her chest became vermillion.

This project took me a long time because I was working on several other pieces at the same time.  I'm afraid I went a little dark with the purple on her belly, but overall I'm happy with the painting.

Artist behaviors:
1.  Artists Create Original Art - For this piece, I was inspired by the sight of a cardinal outside my window and took my own picture of the bird. I went beyond the photograph to create a unique piece that shows my style as a painter.
2.  Artists Take Risks - As I was painting, I decided that I didn't want to stick with traditional or realistic colors. Instead, I intensified the colors that I saw to make the piece more interesting (and less boring to paint :)). I was actually kind of nervous, as I was inventing colors that I wasn't sure would look good together or that I would be able to create shape and form with. I had to be careful not to let the colors mix and create a nasty brown color. I think my color-mixing risks paid off. I am happy with how this turned out.
3.  Artists Develop Art Making Skills - I used oils for this project, a medium that I am getting more and more comfortable with, but I think I still learned some things about manipulating oil paints. I got a little more comfortable with using darker colors, something I tend to have trouble with, and I had to figure some things out about composition and simplifying the picture so the focus would be on the cardinal.

ugly duckling

My ballet company is performing a ballet "The Ugly Duckling" this spring.  (I'm the ugly duckling:))  In honor of the ballet, I painted an ugly duckling (actually a cygnet) and a cute duckling.  These adorable 4x4" canvases were an impulse buy at AC Moore... hey, they were on sale.
First the sketches, done in prismacolors:

(You can see the finished duck here)
And the original swan...

It took me a bit to actually start painting the baby swan, because I couldn't decide what color to make the shadows. I didn't really want to use just plain gray, but I was also kind of nervous about picking a color. I didn't really mean to make its feathers as blue as they turned out. It just kind of happened.

ugly duckling lovely cygnet

The hardest part for me was the foot on the left. I couldn't figure out what colors I needed and where to put them to make it look like a foot and not just a blue-gray extension of the body.
Overall I am pretty happy with how this one turned out :)
Artist behaviors:
1.  Artists Communicate Through Their Work - since this piece was inspired by my role as the ugly duckling, I wanted to communicate the mood of the character and the themes of the ballet. In one scene in particular, the ugly duckling is left behind by her "sisters," the ducklings. They proudly dance away and the ugly duckling realizes that she has been excluded when she wanted so badly to be one is them. I thought this picture captured the quiet disappointment of being left out... something I am not unfamiliar with.
2.  Artists Develop Art Making Skills - I *think* I am getting better at mixing realistic colors.  Painting my animals in crazy colors is not just a stylistic thing... it is easier for me to pick out one color that I see and intensify it than to mix colors accurately.  On this one I got a little closer to the gray of the cygnet's feathers than I have previously.  I'm actually not sure if that is a good thing or not...
3.  Artists Solve Problems - I had a really hard time starting this piece.  For some reason, I could not get it to look right.  I took a break from it for about a week, took a huge step back, and tried to look at it with new eyes.  It turns out I had the shading all wrong - I had highlights in the wrong places and it made the whole thing look a really weird shape.  Even though the swan didn't end up the exact same shape as my reference, I like the way it turned out.

a duck for Laura

In January, my sister Laura was cast as the duck in the ballet "Peter and the Wolf," which my dance company is performing this May.  I told her I would paint a duck in her honor :)  There have been casting changes since then, but I still decided to paint a duck.  Well, a duckling, actually.
(Side note - we are also performing "The Ugly Duckling" so we get double ducks :))

look at those cuties

 I painted it on a cute little 4x4" canvas I found at AC Moore...

I'm pretty happy with this one.  It could use a bit more value in the feathers (plus this picture is kind of washed out... sorry) and I'm still working on the grassy parts...  Turns out most of my oils are transparent or semitransparent, so it's tricky trying to get good coverage.
Artist behaviors:
1.  Artists Develop Art Making Skills - For this project, I used oil paints, which I am becoming more and more familiar with.  I practiced manipulating the paints to get the textures I wanted, such as the down on the duckling's back.  I believe I built my skills with this medium through this project.
2.  Artists Solve Problems - As I mentioned before, many of my oil colors are transparent or semitransparent.  This was especially a problem with the background, because I was trying to use transparent green paint over and orange background.  To cover the area like I needed to, I used less medium so the paint was thicker and mixed the sap green with other colors that are more opaque.  I also intentionally left some of the orange showing through to give the color more depth in some areas.
3.  Artists Communicate Through Their Work - When I chose a picture to paint, I chose a duckling that seemed "dignified" rather than just cute or goofy-looking.  This was important to me because I was trying to portray not only the duck from "Peter and the Wolf" but also the ducklings from "The Ugly Duckling," which are very proud in their rejection of the ugly duckling.

Prismacolor piggy

For this project, the assignment was to draw something transparent with Prismacolor colored pencils.  I must admit, I was not thrilled because I really don't love working with pencils.  I played around with a couple ideas, but most of them seemed pretty boring... all bottles and jars and stuff.  But then I had the idea to work with ice.  I stuck a plastic pig in the bottom of a cup, filled it with water, and froze the cup.
This was the result:

AAAHGGHGHH IT'S ICE PIGGG

It's kinda scary, I know, but I just went with it.  I practiced with the prismacolors a bit

I actually used prismacolor watercolor pencils for the sketch

and decided I was ready to start.
Voilà:

ICE PIG!  he's coming for you.

It was really frustrating because I don't really have the patience for colored pencil.  I feel like I don't have enough control to blend the pencils and make the right colors (a big part of why I prefer painting).  Mistakes feel a lot more permanent in colored pencil than they do in paint, too.  All in all I guess it's not too terrible.  It just wasn't very much fun.

More sheep...

In case you haven't gathered this already, I like to make sheep.  For my first project of the new semester, I decided to make another, only this time, as a 3D piece.

Environmental artist Bryant Holsenbeck visited Apex High and showed us how to make these cute little animals out of trash. (I almost decided to make an elephant instead... silly me)

First, I built a skeleton out of baling wire.  Then I stuffed the skeleton with plastic grocery bags, wrapping the whole thing with yarn so it stayed together.  I swear this thing has dozens of bags inside.  It's heavier than you might expect...

Oh, you were expecting a realistic sheep? NOPE

Next I tore an old pillowcase into strips and wrapped the sheep, because even though it is trash, it doesn't have to look like trash.  I tucked some ears into his head, glued some trash to his face for eyes and a nose, and voilà!

Tada!

I titled the piece "I like ewe", which is funny because I don't really think of it as a female sheep... more like a lamb of indeterminate gender.  He/she doesn't have a name yet.  Suggestions?

Right now this little guy, along with my other sheep, is on display at the Halle Arts Center in downtown Apex until March 14th.  Go check him out! :))

chicken face

When I was thinking about what project to start next, I just kept thinking about how much fun I had painting my sheep.  I wasn't sure what made that sheep different from any of my past projects, but I decided to roll with it and keep with the same theme.  I decided to paint a chicken.  I had also been sketching a little chicken Laura and I make up stories about when we babysit named Bob the Chicken.

Bob the Chicken

I found some references...

I worked mostly from the little guy at the top, second from the left

...and made a sketch...

sketch with oil pastels

...and I just went for it.

Chicken face!

This one was really fun, too.  The hardest part so far has been bringing out lighter and darker values to make the chicken really pop, especially his comb.  I'm still working on that actually :) I am also trying to give him texture without painting individual feathers.  So far I'm very happy with this piece.

...I feel like he needs a name.  Any suggestions?

Fishy

Pretty fishy :))

This piece is also a project from Art III. It is the result of an assignment where we used silk dye. I'd done something similar to this in eighth grade, when we used wax and stuff to batik with a visiting artist. This time, we use gutta and fancy silk dye that stains your fingers and clothes.  (I think my fingers were blue for a while.)  I chose a fish because I thought I could do some cool watery stuff with the dye and because I secretly like fish almost as much as sheep.  I wish I had a picture of the watercolor I made as a sketch because I actually like it better than the final product... Probably because I spent days on the watercolor and the silk actually went more quickly than I expected.  I had some fun with salt, which gave it a kind of bubbly look in some spots.  It was great fun :))  Like I said I'm not as happy with the final as I was with the sketch, but it was something new and I did have a lot of fun making it.

The Beautiful Laura

So this piece is one that I made almost two years ago as my "final project" for Art III. I really enjoyed painting a watercolor of my little brother Jonathan earlier that year, so I decided to do another. I picked out a picture of Laura from when we got our pictures taken earlier that year.  I don't remember whether I projected and traced the image onto the 18"x24" watercolor paper....I think I just drew it out the best I could. I then painted the whole thing with watercolors. I probably could have used a bit more value in the face. I hadn't really worked this large with watercolor before, besides the portrait of Jonathan, and it was a bit tricky to keep it wet so I could blend it all like I needed to. It was also difficult to make her hair really dark like it needed to be, but I think I managed pretty well with that one :)

 My favorite parts are the dress (this picture got cut off a bit... you can see more in the original. I jus kind of squiggled the brush around) and her eyes, which are just gorgeous in real life. Overall I was very happy with how this piece turned out; it is one of my favorite things I have ever done.

I am not left-handed

This is a sketchbook assignment from a couple months ago. I rediscovered it while flipping through my sketchbook and thought I'd share it with y'all :))
It is a self portrait drawn in pencil with my left hand.

I'm beautiful ;)

I am not left handed.

I like sheep

In case you didn't notice from one of my previous posts, I like sheep.  I decided that I wanted to paint a sheep with oils.  So I printed some references:

Sheep!  I chose that guy in the middle as my model.

All of these sheep are a weird off-white color, and that's no fun, so I decided to add a little more color into the wool.  I did the shadows with purple and the highlights with yellow.  It was a bit tricky not to make it muddy, especially because purple and yellow make brown... I think I did a pretty good job though :)
First I did a red-orange wash on my square canvas.  I think the orange color helped me make the blue of the sky as bright as I needed to.  I spent most of my time on the sheep trying to get the texture and values just right and finished up with the sky and the grass.

It's a beautiful sheep.

Sorry this picture was taken at a weird angle...  It was still wet so I left it at school over the break and I will take it home to take a better picture when we get back :))
This is probably my favorite piece I've done this year.  I love how it's realistic-ish and abstractish at the same time.  I also enjoy telling people it's a self portrait and explaining that "Rachel" means "ewe" even though that's not a very funny joke.  I can't wait to bring it home :))

Anxiety Monster

This piece started as a sketchbook project.  The prompt was "the concept of anxiety."  I thought, what does anxiety feel like?  It feels like a fat nasty monster squatting on your shoulders and scratching at your face, making you super tired but you can't close your eyes.  Anxiety feels like insomnia and panic and tension and like you're slowly oozing all your energy out of your ears and like you want to cry yourself to sleep but it's not allowed to be bedtime yet.  So that's what I drew.

sketch in colored pencil and Prismacolor markers

It's kind of creepy, and it makes me a little uncomfortable and a little scared, but hey, anxiety itself makes me a lot uncomfortable and a lot scared.  I accidentally made her (who is kind of me) look a little zombieish, which is not totally what I was going for... She's not dead yet, she just feels like she's on her way there.

I talked to Mrs Rossi and told her I wanted to make it a real project, and she told me mixed media would be cool.  And it just so happened that we were experimenting with visual journaling that week.

Best. idea. ever.  Thanks Mrs Rossi :))

eww.

So I started by printing off some pictures of rats and ROUSs (rodents of unusual size) and lizards and lizard feet as references and to kind of put some method in my madness.  Then I just started gluing stuff down.  I used tissue paper, wall paper, old patterns, newspaper, charcoal, paint... It was a lot of fun.  I just kind of kept on going.  At some point, though, I decided I didn't want to overdo it so I had to stop.
This by itself was cool and all, but it didn't really mean anything.  It's just a background.  So I looked in a mirror and drew a face, so I guess it's kind of a self-portrait, but I took a lot of liberties.  I also kind of forgot about my nose.  I don't really need that, do I? ;)  I watercolored the face and gave myself some oil pastel hair and glued myself down.

Um, on second thought, I think I do need a nose.

It's not done yet... I still have to do the monster.  Kind of the most important part.  I'll let you know how it turns out :)

Update: Just to clarify - This piece/post is a hyperbole of my feelings.  I'm fine, really :))

Kathryn on the Couch

I started this piece this summer at an oil painting/figure drawing workshop with Rose Datoc Dall at SVU.  I got to paint from live models instead of just photographs for the first time.  Which is SO COOL.  It was tricky, though, because people aren't statues... they move!  But it was much better than working off of a photograph.

It was really cool to see all the different styles and perspectives of the same model.  Oh and my piece is right in the middle there :))

I was super super nervous about the whole thing, because I'd never used oils before and they seemed really intimidating.  It was kind of super overwhelming to go to the art supply store and find the brushes and everything that I needed because there is just so much stuff.  And for some reason oils just seem so fancy and official to me, like only "real" artists are allowed to use them.  Which means they must be super hard to use, right? And you have to be a super fantastic artist to be worthy to even attempt, right?
Okay, so I'm exaggerating a little.  Anyways, the point is, I was a little freaked out for no good reason.  It turns out... I love oils!  It turns out you don't have to be official and fancy to use official fancy paint.  I ended up using oils for the first project I did for this class, the pair of pears.  Because they're awesome.
I didn't have enough time to finish the painting over the summer, so I decided to pull it back out again and see what I could do to finish it up.

In progress... 

Still in progress...

(I apologize for the quality of pictures taken with my cell phone... Shame on you, cell phone.)

Kathryn on the Couch

My palette... Kind of all the same color.

I kind of messed up the colors of the fabric we wrapped Kathryn in (whoops), so I had to invent a color for the background.  I also added some more dimension to the fabric with highlights and shadows, and deepened the shadows on her skin since I was scared of the dark this summer so she is super pale.  Confession: I'm still afraid of the dark.
(Paint, that is.)


You'll notice she doesn't really have a face, or fingers.

Oh, I forgot about her shoulder. Better go paint that.

I just didn't want to paint them, so I didn't.  Artistic license, you know.  You'll notice she has toes.

That's as much as I could handle.

Toes!

My favorite part

Overall I'm happy with this piece. I looooooove the colors, and I'm pretty proud of myself for putting my big girl pants on and trying oils.  It's not as scary as I thought it would be.  I think it gave me some confidence to explore with other new media, like mixed media for visual journaling.  And, you know, sprinkles.

Ewww, what's in that jar?

This piece is kind of special to me because it's not like anything I've ever done in art class before, but it's almost exactly like every single thing I do outside of art class.  I'm a big doodler - I love to draw little people on the sides of my history notes, letters, journal, math homework... basically everywhere.  If they're not acting out whatever I was writing about, these little people are actually me, or like a weird little cartoon version of my inner self that describes how I'm feeling.  Kind of like cartoon-Lizzie from the Lizzie McGuire books and TV show.

Anyways, one day in English class, I was thinking about the "That's Buggy" and "Glassed Over" themes and doodling instead of participating in the discussion.  I came up with this little girl:

Hey, it's a very rough sketch.

It's kind of goofy, but I liked it, so I did a sketch for reals in my sketchbook with color and everything:

Haha that elbow.  If you can call it that.

I hesitate to call it a self portrait, but it kind of is.  Actually, I got my lovely sister Laura to pose for me so I could fix that elbow, etc., so it's kind of a portrait of her...?

My lovely Laura.  She's the best.

The dress in the sketch above is a piece of graph paper I found among the papers I've stuck in the front of my sketchbook (good thing I never got around to cleaning it out, right? ;)) which I had drawn this pattern all over just for funsies because I like patterns.  I made it blue with an acrylic wash and glued it in with a glue stick.  Then, I figured I might as well keep going, so I cut the shape of the jar out of a ziplock bag and glued that on.  You can't tell from the scan but it's all shiny.  It was fun, and I wanted to keep on going, so I decided that's how I would do the final project.  I sketched out the final on a piece of poster board and traced it with tracing paper so I could trace the shapes onto my other papers, which include scrapbook and construction paper, more graph paper, tracing paper, a brown paper bag, tin foil, thread, and another ziplock bag.  (I guess those last three aren't actually paper....)  It was tricky to cut it out and glue it down so it all came together like it should and looked like I meant it to.  As is usual when I work with glue sticks, I was hugely frustrated by my inability to keep the glue from getting graphite and eraser crumbs and other nasty stuff in it and making a sticky, pencil-y mess.  Let's just say that glue is not my favorite thing to work with.  I managed to keep damage to a minimum and my piece emerged from my glue-stick nightmares relatively unscathed.  Yay.
One of my topics for this piece is opacity.  I played around with the plastic from the baggie and the tracing paper to try and make the jar look see-through but also like it was, you know, actually there.  I'm kind of still working on that, actually.
So here it is!

"But only with the lid on"

This actually makes me really happy.  I kind of feel like it's missing something...maybe something to emphasize the three-dimentionalishness of the jar.  I'm workin on it :)
I've just been looking back at my other pieces from this year and I've realized that I'm all over the place!  Like I said before, this piece is more like the stuff I tend to draw everyday.  But the other pieces I've made are some of my favorite things I've ever done ever.  Maybe by the end of the year I'll have a more distinctive style as an artist.  Then again, maybe not.  It's more exciting this way :))