Cardboard Animal Structure

          While I was planning out my sculpture, a couple of things crossed my mind. The most frequent thing that crossed my mind was how was going to attach the parts. For almost all parts of my sculpture I used the slot technique to get the pieces to fit properly together and to not use an adhesive. I think it worked out well in the end. Some successes in my build were that I figured out a lot of how I would be able to work my sculpture as I went along (this could be a bad thing) but I learned a lot about working with cardboard in the process.

Process Photos:







Final Profile Photos:

  

Matisse Project Questions

Describe the dominant complimentary colour scheme you chose. How did you make
them appear more dominant than any of the other colours you used? Explain your
reasoning for choosing these colours.

     The dominant complimentary colour scheme I chose was one that used Blue-Green and  Red-Orange. These colours appeared more dominant than the other colours I chose because every other colour use was either a darker hue of green or orange, or a wash of green and orange. When you darken a colour (using black) it takes away some of the sheen of the colour. The main colours in the colour scheme were mixed without black. The reason I chose these colours is that I wanted to make my colours stand out but not clash like yellow and purple.


Did you use pattern in the foreground or background to help create emphasis on a focal
point? Explain.

     I did not use a specific pattern in the foreground or background to create emphasis on the focal point. The only patterning were the two horses. Both of them used the same shape in the body so I thinnk that may have helped your eye move around the page.


Describe the process of planning out your design of the horse drawing in the style of
Matisse and the painting process? What were some difficulties that came up in the
process and some positive developments in your process?

     When I started my design, I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do so I hoped by turning the horses' body I had already traced on another piece of paper into smaller, wavier shapes. After that, I cut out these shapes and tried to place them slightly irregularly to change the shape of the horse. I didn't end up changing the shape of the horse too much. After that, I cut out these same shapes on paper I had painted. I cut out enough shapes to make two horses (one on each sheet). The reason I did this is that I wanted to be able to play around with the colour of the horses until I found something that worked. In the end, the second set of pieces were trimmed to make them smaller and then made into a smaller horse for my background. This horse was the opposite in colours from the other horse becasue I had used the left over shapes. To create the grass at the bottom of my picture I cut out rectangles on the green paper and then I used an X-acto knife to cut out grass. Doing this gave me two lengths of grass and gave some cool effects to them when placed side by side.
     Some difficulties that came up in the process were basically not knowing what I wanted to do. I think that If I knew what I was doing sooner, then my picture could have turned out a bit better. As I got to the end, I didn't know what to do with some of the empty space until Ms. Cockburn told me to step back from my painting. Suddenly the gaping white space seemed a lot smaller and I accepted that not everything needs to be filled in.

Written and Photo Documentation: Final Picasso Horse Painting

Questions:

1. Describe the monochromatic colour scheme you chose. Did you choose analogous or 

complimentary for accent colour? Explain your reasoning for choosing this colour.

The monochromatic colour scheme I chose consists of mainly red-orange and orange colours. For my accent colour, I chose a complimentary colour. The reason I chose this colour was that I wanted to make the horse stand out a lot as I realized it was lacking multiple viewpoints. The colour I chose for the accent was a mixture of yellow, blue and white. As you can see, I used a lot more blue than yellow, but I still wanted a  green tinge so that the colour would actually be opposite on the colour wheel. I used the white to both lighten the colour, but also to take away some of the sheen so that the background did not dominate the painting.

2. Describe the process of planning out your design of the horse drawing in the style of 

Picasso and the painting process? What were some difficulties that came up in the 

process and some positive developments in your process?

To start off, I used the tracing of the horse on tracing paper to give myself an idea of what the final product would look like. By looking at the traced horse on see through paper, it made it a lot easier to visualize. After that, one the other side of the tracing paper, I basically straightened the curves on the horse to make it look more blunt like in Picasso's paintings. Following that, I played around with a second sheet of tracing paper basically trying to make the horse look less "natural". From this, I had the pencil outline of my horse. Using the pressing technique, I transferred this drawing onto a piece of white paper. 

When I started to paint, all I really knew was that using red could make the unnatural shapes of my horse stand out like Picasso did with his paintings, so that is how I came up with red. Once I started painting, I started with what should have been the darkest areas of my horse, (hooves ect.) and lightened the colour as I worked away from those areas. To lighten the colour, I used more yellow as opposed to white. 

A problem I encountered was having difficulty letting go of the orange in my painting. As you can see below, most of the process paintings are all orange with slightly darker shades of red-orange. I chose the blue-green shade for the background because I wanted the horse to stand out against it. I was afraid the background would swallow the horse though, so I added a white outline to the horse.

Process Photos:

Process Photos - Collage

Process Photo 1

Completed

Cornell Box Theme One and Two

Theme One Topic: City

What will you express through your art?
Through my art, I would like to express how cities [are?] downtown. I would like to show all of the shops and buildings because even though they are not very nice looking individually, I think that they look very cool as one object.

How will you accomplish this in your piece?
I will (try) to accomplish this by using interesting colours along with the greys of the city. I might also cut srips of magazine material with scissors to make straight linesfor the buildings.

Resources Needed:
For this piece, I will need lots of magazines to make a collage background and maybe some extra paper to make some 3-D objects in the foreground.

Theme Two Topic: Nature

What will you express through your art?
I would like to express through my art a strange side of nature through the collage. Because nature is not perfect, I would rip the colours out of the magazine as opposed to cutting them as I mentioned above.

How will you accomplish this in your piece?
I would like to accomplish this in my piece by ripping as I mentioned above and by using greens, reds, oranges and blues (and a lot of white in one particular piece) because I think that those are the most natural colours.

Resources Needed:
For this piece, I would like some fishing wire and paper to make .some snowflakes out of, and a lot of magazine material for the colours. For my other idea, I could use some sand for a beach.

InspirationalPhotos

Art Summative Evaluation 1

Art Summative Evaluation 1

1. Write a minimum of a paragraph explaining your interpretation of the music and lyrics. Explain how you used certain elements or principles of design to describe the selected piece of music.

My interpretation of the music and lyrics is that the song “Airplanes” is a fairly slow song so it made me slow down while I painted and think a bit more about exactly what I painted. I suppose this could have been bad and good because you usually learn from your mistakes. From slowing down I found that I only made two complete mistakes throughout the entire painting. I definitely tried to use many layers of paint because first of all, I like to paint thickly and I don’t really like thin washes of paint. But second, the slow music of the song got me into a sort of rhythm where I painted over and over and the painting got really thick.

What discoveries or techniques did you find helpful through the process?

Some techniques that I found really helpful through the process of painting my painting (?) were layering the paint a lot to make it look really thick. I especially think that this was useful because I wanted my painting to be very dark and by painting over and over, it gave the illusion of foreverness until you got to my city skyline.

Another technique (not really a technique but a tool almost) that I found useful was using painters tape to give myself crisp lines. Now that I look back, I could have use it more than on a park bench (didn’t work out) on shooting stars (also didn’t work out) and the borders (I think they look great). I could have used it to create more of a crisp walkway so that it would not get confused with and a river and maybe just to limit the space that some objects in my painting took up.

What are two skills that you learnt and what is one area that you feel you work on to improve your skills?

I feel that I improved a lot in painting straighter lines because I always find myself painting curvy. (New paintbrushes helped a lot) That isn’t really too much of an accomplishment but straight as opposed to wavy looks much more sharp. I also think that I improved at making colours to paint with. Usually when I mix colours I find I have not found the right colour but I guess just from experience I became better at gauging how much of each colour to mix.

One thing that I would like to improve on is giving my painting more texture. Usually my paintings ulook flat and this one especially (except for the dotted stars does).