Embellished Blind Contour Self-Portrait Drawing

The topic of my next blog is my Embellished Blind Contour Self-Portrait Drawing.  For those of you who don't know, a blind contour drawing is a drawing where you don't look at your paper (don't worry you get to look in a mirror) while your do a self-portrait. To make our drawing more personal and visually interesting we added sentences about ourselves. Such as “I am…” or “I dream...” I haven't quite finished yet, but here is what I have currently.

I have to be honest, it's not my favorite piece, but it's not my worst.  I just have to remember I drew it without looking.  I'm not sure what it needs, but I'm hoping to figure it out soon. I'll update soon. Until next time.

Empty Bowls

This post will contain information about a program at my school called Empty Bowls.  The Empty Bowls program is where all of the Creative Arts students at HTHS make, glaze, and fire bowls for a HUGE pasta dinner for anyone who would like to come. All of the proceeds go to the Food Bank of New Jersey.  Helping with this project really made me feel great that I can help people in need.

There is a huge problem in America and that is hunger.  One in four children in America is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life. Though my act is small, I am still making a difference. It reminds me of when, at my church, I helped make dinners for My Father's House.

I had a lot of fun learning to make the bowls and creating them. I'd have to say that the glazing was my favorite part.  Here are some of the bowls that we made.

I am super excited for the dinner and to help out. Below is a link for more info on Empty Bowls. Until next time!

http://www.emptybowls.org/

Paper Lantern

For this blog post I will be talking about the paper lanterns we made. So far I think this has been my favorite project. To begin this piece we sketched our idea for our lantern. It had to be based on a season, but other than that we were pretty much free to design it however we wanted. After finishing your draft you then copy it onto the better quality paper. Next, you take an Exacto knife and cut the paper where you want the light to come through. I tried to make my designs similar, but different at the same time. On each side I incorporated a tree, five ducks, and the sun.  I choose to do one side fall and the other side spring. Here is my final product... (It's double sided!)

I really enjoyed doing this piece. It has been my favorite project we have done so far.  I think one of the reasons I like it is because no matter what your design is it will look beautiful. Also in my piece I really like how on the fall side of my lantern, the light is focused on the setting sun. It was a very nice surprise  when I finally lit the candle.  I am very excited that I finished. I hope that my classmates are just as happy with their piece as I am with mine.

Edgar Degas Research Post

For my next post, I will be talking about Edgar Degas. Degas was born on July 19, 1834 of French decent.  By 1845, he had begun school at Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Degas frequently visited Italy to study the works of great artist before him, such as Michelangelo.  Upon returning to France, he continued his art education by copying works at the Louvre.  Throughout Degas' life he was mostly ignored by the public.  Hardly any of his paintings were sold, let alone put in a museum.  Degas was thought of as an Impressionist, but to himself he was a Realist.

For my assignment, I am to select three of his works that I like. 

My first is called "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years."

I really love this piece because of the medium that Degas uses. Many paintings of dancers use a lot of light colors, but this is very dark and somewhat mysterious.  I also like this piece because I think it is interesting that Degas has his subject stand in such a simple pose instead of having a more intricate pose.

My second work of is called "The Rehearsal."

The way that Degas captures the shadows and the natural light in this painting is very appealing to me.  It creates a lot of visual interest throughout the piece and draws the viewer in. This painting is located in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Degas' third piece is called "Ballet Rehearsal on Stage 1847."

I love how it seems that this painting is almost black and white.  It emphasizes on shadow and light and creates an amazing affect. I believe this is on of Degas' best pieces. This piece is located in Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

I really enjoy a lot of Edgar Degas' work. Like I said before he shows a lot of difference between light and shadow.  Also Degas was one of the first few artists who began a technique that almost made their pieces look like photographs. Parts of his subject would be cut off to give a more realistic look. I'm really glad I had this opportunity to learn about an artist and hope to now notice many of Degas pieces all around.

Reflection of My Year so Far

Already its the end of the marking period.  It feels like just yesterday was the first day of school. When I walked in to art for the first time, I didn't know what to expect.  I had taken art in middle school with the same teacher, but I was told it is very different. Even without knowing what I'd gotten myself into to begin with, overall I'm really happy with my first marking period. I learned many interesting techniques.  One that I especially liked was the gloss medium transfer.  A gloss medium transfer uses gloss medium to transfer the ink from a magazine page (or any paper with ink on it) onto another paper.  I think this is such a fascinating technique that creates an amazing result.  I used this method in my Next President Collage.  Moving on from this topic, I think I've improved a lot in my artistic ability this marking period. Not just in learning ways of creating art, but also becoming more confident in my work.  I think one of my biggest problems is not being sure of my ideas. This marking period I really had a chance to see what I can do and how great my ideas can turn out. Also if you remember from my first post I mentioned two of my goals for the marking period. One was to learn new things (I think I've pretty much driven home that I learned something) and to improve myself by opening my mind to different kinds of people. I believe that I've done a good job at satisfying these goals and I hope the rest of the year is just as successful. Until next time, Au Revoir!

Next President Collage

As you probably know the election is right around the corner.  My art teacher assigned us to create a collage having to do with the election and topics that are being discussed among the candidates. I decided to try to "talk" about the environment and a combination of mine and Obama's view.  I started off with a back round o f grey with a circle in the middle to represent the swirling pollution and the bit of hope for clean energy.  I'm not crazy about this piece, but I still like it. I think I didn't like this as much as my shoe drawing is because I was never sure of what I wanted to do or if it would work out the way I would like it to. I think over all I'm happy with the result and I'm also happy that I learned new techniques of transferring ink. I'm looking forward to seeing this in my book.

Shoe Drawing

As I said before I am assigned to write this blog for my art class at my highschool. This post is about the shoe drawings we did. My teacher told my class to bring in a pair of shoes to add to a pile for our table.  I decided to bring my old pointe shoes. I began by making a rough outline of the shoes I decided to draw.  To make my focus a little clearer I used a "path finder." A path finder is a small peace of paper with a square cut out in the middle so you can focus just on the specific shoes that you're drawing. After about two weeks of shading and adding detail my product was the picture above.  I'm really proud of my work. I didn't know I could draw something like this.  Sometimes I got discouraged, but I worked through it and made something that, to me, is truly beautiful. I hope that I can continue improving through out the year and make more great pieces