Book Carving

I wanted my book carving to have meaning and show many different emotions in one piece. I thought that although it was important to have a very clear idea of what you wanted to do, you cannot plan everything because then there would be no emotion in the art whatsoever. I realized as I was cutting that my design was extremely intricate and I also realized the book was a little too thick, which caused some problems. In order to overcome these problems I adjusted my design slightly to make it simpler and then I added more things to be cut in my design to help get deeper into the book. I wanted my design to be symbolic in a variety of different ways. First the eagle carrying a watch is mean to represent American life draining the time we want to spend on ourselves and the eagle chasing after the butterflies shows how life hunts down the free-spirited people who are still trying to chase their dreams and forces them into the reality. Yes, I used acrylic paint which would cover the words and I wasn't sure if I wanted to take that much of the book away but I watered some of it down so that it is visible and I also created minuscule figures of butterflies which were terrible to cut out. I feel this project was overall successful because I'd never worked with books before and my designs were trickier than they needed to be.

Amusement

For our amusement project I decided to create a world of dream and fantasy, since many find comfort and amusement in world of myth and wonder. I incorporated variety in my piece by adding multiple characters both good and bad and then created an atmosphere that shaped their personality. I wanted soft materials and dark rigid shapes as well as smooth light colors. In my piece I used a little bit of everything from watercolor to fabric and colored pencils. At first I was confused on how to put this all together, but I knew I wanted there to be a splice of everything in it. In order to make it work I had to spread the different mediums all over the page to get everything to blend smoothly. Our time spend on our visual journal gave us a chance to be creative and test out new materials as well as help us to decide which ones we liked best. I found out that gluing things on top of fabric comes off easily. Some challenges I faced are determining where to place certain mediums and how to mix specific themes together in a way that makes them belong.

Non Traditional Portrait

After deep consideration and thought I chose myself, because even though I have many people that I love I wanted others to see me in a different way.I spent an eternity, digging through the depths of my brain, trying to uncover the things that make me who I am. When I had found a sufficient supply of ideas, I began to eliminate them by efficiency and methodically. Finally, I came across 3 ideas 2 of which seemed impossible. The third was excruciatingly time consuming, but I had found it to be the one with most rewards. I had decided on compiling my piece with the medium of...The Apex High School Marching Band. This material proved to be difficult, but in the end it helped to show how much of an impact marching band has made on me in the past two years. I feel it is important to create the person you chose out of something that defines them, because it helps you to see their personality as well as their looks. I took a risk when I chose the difficult medium of The Marching Band. I had to draw the layout and place everyone, while finding a time for them to all meet me, and didn't interfere with practice. My choices made the picture feel personal. I used the band that I'm in and the field that we practice on, which made the photo special to me.

Sticky Situation

For sticky situation, I sketched out idea's which consisted a tower of candies, crayons lit like candles and a pile of glue splayed on a table with strung beads and ribbon. After a long elimination process I decided this would be the funnest and more colorful out of all the other choices. I think my ideas were pretty interesting, but not too far out of the box. I was able to incorporate rhythm and pattern with the beads and the colors. I chose to use acrylic because I wanted a solid feel to the painting and I wanted to be able to blend colors easily. The acrylic made it easy to add highlights to the lighter regions of my painting, and easier to add dark spots to the shadier ones. The mini lessons helped me to think about all the ways I could use each paint, by trying different brushes and different surfaces.