The start of a new year

The vacation is over! Winter break has come and gone and it's the start of another new year. And with the new year comes new motivations, goals to accomplish and a semester of new classes and new challenges.

Over break I keep myself busy by working, reading, snowboarding, drawing, ice sculpting, going on winter hikes and spending time with my friends, family and girlfriend.








Here is some photographic documentation of my winter break exploits...

A hike through the pines in Findley Lake

Cool scenery on our journey

What's this?? A bar in the middle of the woods? What luck!

Asbury trails

Sara is definitely prepared for a winter hike

Bridge that crosses the creek

Now here are some pictures of the ice sculpture my friend and I made just the other day...

We were inspired by similar works we had seen by artist Andy Goldsworthy 

Unlike Andy, we were a little more experimental than trying to accomplish some kind of aesthetic goal...

...but I think it came out great anyway!

Winter break was long and I had a lot of fun. And although the new semester means less time to be spent with the people I want to spend it with the most, I am very excited about my new classes and can't wait to start some challenging new projects!

Self-portrait

This was the last project of the semester for my 2D design class. The goal was to create a self-portrait from a photograph and paint it using a split complementary color scheme. And like the last post stated, we were also allowed to use white, black and achromatic gray.

A split complementary color scheme takes a color and splits its opposite into the colors that fall immediately on either side of it.

I used red as the primary color of my design. Then, I took it's opposite, green, and split it into green/yellow and green/blue.


I used the green/yellows with white and black for the the middle and lightest tones on the face. I then thought it would look interesting if I used a flat, desaturated red for the darkest darks on the face.

I used green/blue with white and black to detail my sweatshirt. This, in turn, made it look very minty and separated from the face. It seemed the colors in the face and the colors in the sweatshirt caused a lot of tension. So, to create more unity, I used the lightest colors of the sweatshirt as highlights in the face.

Space Collage, Space Reversal, Color Grid Compositions

The beginning of this project started out with a collage. We had to cut out various shapes from magazines and newspapers and use color to create a sense of space in our picture plane. For the next step, we had to take our collage and create a painting that reversed the space we had established. So if there was a specific object in the foreground (like my design), it had to be painted in such a way so that it receded into the background or became a void space in the picture plane. Next, a grid composition was made up of 12 drawn thumbnails taken from different areas of the collage design. Wherever there was something interesting happening within the design, I squared it off and made it into a thumbnail. With 24 to begin with, we had to take 12 of them and arrange them, 3x4 (3 thumbnails by 4), into something that started to take shape. Then, once some sort of recognizable design surfaced, we did some additive and subtractive touch-ups to accentuate that design. Once a solid design was establish, two color compositions were made from it. The first was painted using an analogous color scheme while the second uses a neutral color scheme. We were also permitted to used white, black and achromatic gray.

Though I used almost all cool colors in my collage, I feel I was able to make the object pop forward from the background by using intense greens and yellows against the dark blues.

For the reversal, I used the bright yellows and greens in the background and used dark blues to make the object in the foreground seem like a void in space. But since the organic shaped object stays inside the picture plane instead of moving off, the object is still trying hard to be perceived as foreground. I think if these branch like shapes were to move off of the page, the composition would have been more successful.











Here are my two final color compositions...

Analogous

Neutral

An Analogous Color Scheme uses a primary or secondary color and it's immediate tertiaries to the left and right. 

My design: red, red/violet and red/orange

A Neutral Color Scheme uses any color with its compliment. 

My design: yellow and violet

Word as Image

The objective of this assignment was to illustrate a word using that word only. We were allowed to take a literal or an ironic approach to our designs. Going against everything that defines my personality, I decided on the former. I came up with a lot of interesting ideas, but the two that I decided on were "sexual" and "topple".

This one is pretty obvious, so I'm not going to go into detail. But I will mention that the size of the letters aren't consistent with each other. I could have spent more time measuring them to make it a more accurate representation and thusly, a more effective design.

I was particularly fond of this one. Out of all of my ideas, I thought this was the most unique. The friction between the letters creates a sense of intimacy and the coupling of three even pairs worked out perfectly. In retrospect, I feel as though I could have created more contrast between the type and the background to make the word pop out a little more.

Black and White Study

This particular project was extremely time consuming. We were asked to take a masterwork from art history and re-paint it in a black and white study. The objective was to see what effect color has on the original piece and also to study the compositional structure. In this piece, there's a strong sense of diagonality and use of triangles.

You can see that it transfers well in black and white. I think value, more than color, is what really makes the image stand out and gives the figures a multidimensional feel.

This masterwork was originally done by Leon Kelly, an american surrealist.

Here is the process from start to finish:

My final design

Original painting
"Radioactive Human Residue"
1961

Letter as Image

For this project we were asked to use two different letters of the alphabet in any readable font to create a design. We could repeat the letters as often as we wanted but had to use at least four gradations of value between black and white in our designs.

I chose the letters "G" and "Y".

This was a simple project but I found that I had a hard time coming up with ideas and thumbnails. I didn't want to use an outrageous font and I aimed to keep it simple.

While playing around with thumbnails I noticed that the "Y" kind of looked like a tree trunk and that if I shrunk other "Y"'s, they would consequently look like branches. I then arranged small "G"'s around those branches to give the sense of leaves.












For our other design, the objective was to have the letters lose their identity.
My idea was simple; I arranged the letters so that they would be behind one another in such a way that their identity was obscured. Then, to add an interesting effect, I layered them in space from largest to smallest.

The Fighting Scots!!!

This sketch was for my Drawing I class. We had gone outside for the day and set ourselves up around this new sculpture erected on campus. It was pretty difficult to draw, not only because we hadn't yet had any lectures in human anatomy, but also because the body was covered in a large, wisping mass of cloth and cape. But, prior to this we had done several exercises in class to help develop our hand-eye coordination. We were instructed to draw outlines of still lives without looking at the paper on which we drew on. Over and over again for two hours we did this. It was very difficult to master, but these exercises really helped me understand how to draw this sculpture. Since I couldn't see the structure of his frame, I utilized what I had learned through the exercises (along with measuring techniques) to accurately capture the posture and scale of the figure. 

After I had established a line drawing, I then tried to capture values. I didn't have enough time to render the image completely, but I was able to depict a general feeling of the lights and darks.