Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Mayan funeral ritual pitcher thingie with spout

Design II class
Grade:A

Porcelain sculpture.

Design II class
Objective: Create an abstract or natural object from a block of porcelain.
Comments: What was supposed to be three peas in a pod turned out to look more like three boobs in a casserole dish. I worked hard to carve toward the bottom half of the peas to bring a curved, round shape. I'm just glad I tried to cram three instead of two or would have looked completely obvious I'm just a perv.
Grade: B+

Monday, April 23, 2007

Self-portrait #2

Drawing Class
Objective: Much like the painting, only this will be pencil/graphite.
Grade: B (deserved worse)
Due: sooner than I think.
Comments: Big blank sheet will remain a big blank sheet until I can be led by example. I don't know how/where to start.

3/4 inch grid, centered.1/2 inch grid below, ready to be transferred over to that big blank sheet above. This is proof I don't smile as much as I should. I give my dentist hundreds of dollars a year without the help of dental insurance so I owe it to him, or myself.... whomever.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Charcoal drawing: reductive

Drawing class
Objective: With a sheet of drawing paper, cover the entire sheet with compressed charcoal. Then remove and blend the charcoal to recreate the still life.
Comments: This is one of the most frustrating assignments I've done. The teacher offered several points, ideas, and comments to help me along but it just never clicked in my head. So along with the projects I've completed and succeeded in, there will always be failure and need for improvement. This is a perfect example of the latter.
Grade: D (for deserved)
For those playing the guessing game at home, you see a ghostly image of a boxing glove with a light bulb in the palm, a pig, and a mask.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Still life drawing.

Drawing class
Objective: Use vine charcoal and compressed charcoal to recreate this still life.
Comments: This is going better than the last charcoal project. I'm not too fond of using charcoal. It's difficult to get the overall shape needed and just the feeling of pushing it across the coarse drawing paper gives me the jitters. Much like the nails down the chalkboard feeling.
Grade: pending

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Self-portrait - A.K.A.: The 100-hour project

Design I Class
Objective: Self-portrait, paint-by-numbers style, acrylic paint.
Comments: There's a reason it's called the 100 hour project.
Grade: Four weeks from now.
We've been working with acrylic paint lately, creating a color scale. Then on a huge sheet of paper we've created a 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch grid. My teacher took a picture of each one of us.... converted it into a paint-by-numbers-esque photo....gave us two copies.... one for us to trace.

The Jack Nicholson project was simply practice!
... and made a grid out of the outlined image. The image is in 1/4 inch squares, so each square will have to be hand-drawn and double the size when it's transferred over to the big sheet. 2478 little boxes, one at a time.20% of the 2478 done. That's 495.6 1/2 inch boxes complete.Tracing all of this by hand was just too much of a load to handle, so I did scanned in the color image, desaturated it (took out the color), enlarged it, and added brightness/contrast to help see what I'm tracing on the LIGHT TABLE. What you see in the image above took three hours by freehand. What you see below took about three hours on the light table.Six or seven colors down, fifty to sixty more to go.