The type of sculpture I made in this unit was a linoleum cut, which is a type of relief carving (carving pieces out of a flat surface) that is used to make an ink print. Below are some steps to make a linoleum cut and print.
In this piece, I had to use a found object to make art. I used dried acrylic paint from the inside of a cup to create a coral reef, and I used a Sharpie marker to draw a seahorse living in the reef. I solved problems by using a found object in an unconventional and original way to create a new piece.
"Coffee Girl" In this piece, the problem I had to solve was incorporating newspaper into my artwork. I started by making flowers that I thought looked interesting, and then I decided to make a girl to go with the flowers. After I drew the girl and water colored the background, I made the decision to add more color by painting her hair with coffee. Then I glued the flowers to her hair and made her lips out of newspaper.
This painting is the second part of my series where the limitation was not touching the paintbrush to the paper. For this one, I gave the tree an interesting texture by coloring in the tree with a marker and changing the directions of the marker often. I solved problems in this piece by splattering watercolor on my paper, outlining the tree with tape.
In our second unit, we learned how to create original art by "stealing" from other places, such as other artists, other subjects, and other ideas in general. At the beginning of this unit, I thought that original art was only original if you came up with the entire concept by yourself, using only your ideas. Throughout the unit, I learned that every idea is built on someone else's ideas, and it's impossible to create something that is 100% your own. Everything is inspired by something or someone else. I now believe that art is still able to be original if you "steal" from someone else's work, by incorporating different elements of that piece of art into your own and changing it to create something new. The first project that we did in this unit was our Character Remix. I combined two of my favorite animated movies, The Little Mermaid and The Nightmare Before Christmas. By combining the two characters of Ariel and Sally, I created a new, original piece of artwork. I used colored pencils to draw Scariel and her creepy companions, and I used a dark watercolor color scheme in the background to create an ominous mood within the piece. Before this unit, I would have considered this work less original, but now I can see that I have created a different, original version of Ariel. Our second project this unit was our 2 into 1 artwork. I combined my favorite animal, a shark, with something equally as deadly, a pair of stilettos. I liked the idea that the sharks would be eating one of the less intimidating shoes in the closet, so I drew a flip flop. However, I also wanted to make the flip flop part of the 2 into 1, so I colored it like a clown fish. This piece is original because I'm creating something totally new from the two objects I chose to combine. My final project this unit was my Subject Steal. I made a visual journal out of scenes from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The subject I stole from in this project was literature. One way I did this was by taking scenes and quotes from a popular work of literature and painting them using watercolor, incorporating both literature and art. Another way I stole from literature was by painting inside the book itself. Doing this created a unique surface and background for my artwork and helped show how literature was involved in my piece. I created my subject steal using pen and ink as well as watercolor in parts of the picture where color was supposed to be more prominent, such as Alice's dress and hair. I used my Pinterest board for inspiration.
Throughout this unit, I learned more about how to create original art by incorporating elements of other works of art or ideas around me into my work. My perspective on visual art has changed greatly over the course of the unit. In our first unit, Artists Observe, we learned about drawing from observation. One of the first drawings that I did this unit was a blind contour line drawing of a bottle. A blind contour line drawing is a drawing with no looking at the paper, erasing, or picking up the pencil. This drawing greatly helped me start learning how to properly observe an object, by noticing all the little things about it and getting a feel for perspective. This photo is of the blind contour line drawing I did of the bottle. Obviously it isn't the best or most realistic drawing, but drawing while only being able to look at the object in question really helped me observe all of the details I may have missed if I had been looking at my paper the whole time. This is the drawing of the bottle I did after I completed my blind contour line drawing. As you can see, I paid attention to details such as the tape and the stickers on the side of the bottle, as well as the highlight from the light source. I also paid more attention to contour lines, as I used varying line thicknesses to add depth to the picture. This picture was my observational contour line drawing, in which I observed my bobble head of Daryl from The Walking Dead. Here, I focused on composition and perspective, two different things we learned in this unit. I cut off the top of his head to achieve a more interesting composition, and I measured my object to try and make my drawing as accurate as possible, since I was more than tripling his proportions. One thing I didn't take into account was value, which we practiced working with a few days later. My final drawing from this unit was a still life of objects from my third favorite movie, Mary Poppins. In this drawing, I took into account composition, proportions, and value. My composition is interesting because I have multiple items going off the page and converging in the middle, so your eye is drawn to the center. In this drawing, my use of value has improved greatly, you can see the highlight on the umbrella and the use of shading on the silk of the suffragette sash. Since the carpet bag was covered with a pattern, it was hard to noticeably give it value, but on the leather straps, I used a range of tones. Proportion wise, the items all look correct, and I achieved that by just using my observational skills that I learned in this unit to gather all the details and see how the different parts of the objects looked in relation to each other. Overall, I think I have grown artistically from the start of the unit to the end of the unit.
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