Extra Credit: Frivolous Spending

I spent $5 frivolously on a dress for my dog.  I think I actually got a size too small so it doesn’t go down very far on her, but it’s still kind of cute I think.  And I thought it was fun to go and look through all the clothing for dogs.  They’re cute but definitely frivolous I think.  I took two more photos, but this is the one I liked best.

By the way, her name’s Jasmine and she’s a chinese crested (16 months old).  My best friend just got her for me last weekend actually as an early Christmas gift. :]

Faking It

Music by Ali Helnwein (who also composed the song I used for my music drawing)
Video directed by Mercedes Helnwein

Music Drawing

For this project we were asked to create a drawing based on an instrumental song that we were allowed to choose.  I chose the song, “Greed,” by Ali Helnwein, one of my favorite modern composers (his father, Gottfried Helnwein, is actually my favorite artist).  I used charcoal, gesso, graphite, and ink on paper; using different marks and mediums to represent different sounds and instruments.  I enjoyed making something based on music, since I’ve always loved music and I love incorporating art and music in this way.  While I was making these two drawings there were times when I wanted to make marks based on my personal preference to make them look more aesthetically pleasing, in my opinion, but I resisted those urges because I wanted the drawings to be almost dictated by the music and I didn’t want to make marks that I felt were not present in the song I had chosen.

If you want to hear the song I used again it’s on Ali’s myspace:  www.myspace.com/alihelnwein

Book Drawings

This was one of my favorite projects.  I thought the idea of making a small piece of art for an unknown person to someday find was an interesting and exciting idea.  I like the thought that one day someone may find something that I have made in a book and I hope whoever finds these pieces is inspired by them in some way.

For this piece I wanted the color of the paper to look older so i rubbed cinnamon over the paper to make the color darker and make it look more antiqued.  The quote is from the last line in the book, “We’ll all be ready always.”  I thought it would be interesting to have that line paired with the image I got when I read the title of the book (The Goose Hangs High).  I used colors to mimic the color pattern on the front cover of the book.

Again I used a color scheme present on the front cover of the book.  And again I used a quote that I found in the text itself.  This time the quote was taken from a very early point in the book, but I thought it sounded interesting and might be even more interesting for someone to remember after they have finished the book.  I drew an woman who looks like she could have lived in the ’40s, the time that the book was published.  I liked the idea of using a woman looking up so you could see her neck, since the book is titled, “Mary’s Neck.”

This was my least favorite book to work with, probably because I didn’t feel a strong connection with the book, it’s context, or its history.  The book is actually a sci-fi novel and I’m not very familiar with that genre so I decided to research the author.  Apparently the author of the book did a lot of research on how to construct a UFO and had actually made blueprints for a few, so I decided to trace parts of the blueprints I found on the internet on the card for this book.  All the blue lines are from the blueprints I found and the words are all text from random places in the book.

I enjoyed working with this book a lot.  I liked the design of the front cover and again tried to mimic that when making my card for the book.  I drew a lamp freehand, similar to the one of the front cover of the book (which unfortunately turned out a little crooked) and wrote a quote in Hebrew which translates to, “your heart, it wants to live.”  This quote is actually from a song by Yael Naim, but I since the book was written around the Christian religion I felt a quote in Hebrew, an important language for Christianity, would be appropriate.  I considered quoting the bible, but I’m not a religious person and didn’t want to make a piece of art that was strongly attached to any particular religion.

Sadly I lost the image I took of the book that accompanied this drawing and the book has already been returned to UNCG’s Library.  I think the book was called, “Headless Angel,” or something similar.  And I think it was grey with the title and author’s name in white text.  A great deal of the book seemed to deal with death and graveyards so I decided to make a drawing that was similar in some way to a tombstone.  The book also contained a lot of quotes and lines that were not in English, so I decided to incoporate that with my card as well.  The quote I used is German and I think would translate roughly to, “Examine what is, and not what pleases you.”  I put the date of publication at the top in a style that I thought looked similar to dates found on some older tombstones.

Plexiglass Design

I worked with Brian and Danielle on this project where we were asked to create an image using different pieces of plexiglass and colored paper.  We choose four different colors of paper and got to work.  We considered the colors we had to work with and tried to imagine what we could create from those colors using the layering with plexiglass.  Obviously we decided on creaing a pond with fish and lillypads.  We tried to layer the blue paper and put our cut out fish on different layers to give the water in the pond a sense of depth and make our image look more 3-D and realistic.  I like the way it turned out and I think it was a lot of fun to work on and put together as a group.

Wood Floor Sculptures

For this project two partners and I were asked to arrange wood in different ways on the floor.  I enjoyed working in a group and working outside of the classroom.  I thought it was refreshing to take a break from working at a table or desk and work on a project in the floor.  It was interesting to try and think of the way the wood would looked from above while arranging it on ground level.  I also thought it was interesting to see how different groups interpreted each task in different ways and came up with such varying results.

Checkers with Charcoal

For this assignment, Jennifer and I played a game of checkers using a large sheet of white paper and charcoal.  For every move we had to erase the old position of our checker and draw in the new location.  It was fun playing a game I hadn’t played in years and it was interesting erasing and re-drawing all the pieces.  In the end I think the drawing looked a lot more interesting than I had expected it too.  I expected it to look simple and messy, but I think it turned out pretty interesting with all the smudges and marks that had been worked into and out of the paper.

Google Images

The word I choose for this project was “empty.”  I thought it was a word that was vague enough to give me a variety of images and interesting enough to give me images that would be fun to work with.  I looked through a lot of pages at google until I found the images that I thought were best.  I like all of them, but my favorite is the empty bed.  I feel like that photograph is a good depiction of the word, “empty,” and I like the headboard.

Diebenkorn Photographs

I enjoyed working on this project a lot.  I love photography and it was interesting to try and photograph things that reminded me of Diebenkorn’s style of drawings.  My photos were mostly taken in alleys in downtown Wilmington and Greensboro.  I felt like the more rugged downtown architectural style and the dirtiness of the alleys represented Diebenkorn’s style well.

The first, seventh, and tenth photographs are my favorites.  The first was taken in Wilmington and the seventh and tenth were both taken in Greensboro.  I really like the composition of the first and the seventh, and I like the high contrast of the tenth.

I put all the photos in portrait orientation so it would be easier to print and kept them that way because I think seeing some of the photos in a different orientation helps you to focus more on the spaces created by the objects and less on the objects themselves, which I think helps when trying to relate the photographs to Diebenkorn’s drawings.

Diebenkorn Charcoal Drawing

For this project I worked with Jennifer to try and recreate a drawing by Diebenkorn.  Since the drawing was basically split by a line down the center we decided to each work on one half at a time so we could focus more on the details in smaller sections.  It’s interesting trying to replicate another artist’s work because I think everytime you try you learn something new about the process.  I think for this project I was able to get a better feeling and understanding of the soft charcoal we were using and by trying to create a drawing that was placed in front of me I was able to see and attempt to replicate a technique that I think was very effective.