Art Style Development

Goal For The Year:

• Creating art works by experimenting different materials.
• Challenging self to draw and paint in different technique.
• Exploring self's weakness and strength.
• Drawing/painting from living objects, enhance self's observation skill.

Extension of the Gelatin Print:

For this project, I evenly rolled paints on the gelatin and then gently placed random objects on top of the Gelatin, afterward I pressed over the paper on top of the gelatin to make prints. And our goal for this project is to draw on top of the prints to make extension, and also challenging our creativity on the limited forms and shapes.

I did not use any of the prints for extension, instead, I used a print that made from the rest paint in the glass. I found that it has a muddy and old film paper textures, and my original plan was to use pen and draw black and white drawing of an old Chinese town. But because of my personal reason, i chose to draw with my left hand, for relaxing myself and having less concern about my perfectionism. So I used my left hand and drew with the fine pointed pen, as you can tell that all the lines are not straight and the perspective are not correct. After I finished the drawing, I added watercolor wash also by my left hand (but mixed color with right hand). In which, I think the color wash covered most of the mistakes, and it brings a different feeling contrasting other of my works.

Drawing with left hand (non-dominant hand) is hard and challenging, but I found out that I did not think too much about what I should draw for next step. The whole process was hard but also relaxing my mind, and less pressure for me to create art. I enjoyed the process of drawing with my left hand because it is a playful way to draw with, and also challenged myself to go out of my comfort zone for a while.

I picked wood ducts from the list of species from the official site of the Duck Stamp Junior Competition, and they became my main focuses for this project.

To get this project started, I found a few reference photos from the internet, and then I used color pencils (I can dig in more details) as my material to work with. First, I used gray color pencil to sketch out the rough shape of the two ducks. Then I started with the head of the male wood duck's head, which it has the most color of the whole drawing, and then move to the body and the female wood duck. But all I did for most part of this drawing was to lightly covered the base colors and then added more colors on top of each layers. I found that the fur was the most difficult parts of the drawing, because they has the most textures and patterns; I wanted to show the details of the fur, so I paid most of my times on them. The male wood duck's fur has a smoother feeling on its chest, so I did not find a good method to draw, and they ended up looking a bit awkward. Although the I spend most of my time on the female wood duck's fur, but they end up looks fine because I found the method of drawing them: drew out the darker area of the fur, and left the lighter color alone, then gradually added layers of colors for both parts and finally adjusted the colors in between the light and darker areas of the fur.

As result, I submitted the drawing on the second day of the deadline, and I did not finished the background which I found really frustrating because I did not have enough time (I did not feel good to draw or paint for a long time) and I hate unfinished work. Perhaps I would have a chance to finish the drawing when I get the drawing back from the competition.

This project was based on the "Arrive Alive" Competition, which it wants senior high school students, to write paper, to draw/paint a poster, and to create video about telling teenagers to not drink and drive or texting while driving.

When I knew the prompt, there was an image floating around my head: the car was burning and surrounding with smokes and red flames, the lighten screen of the phone lie on the ground. So, these pieces elements became my objects of this drawing. I first drew a messy sketch on the paper, then transferred the lines on the other piece of paper by using the light table. Next, I used black marker to draw the silhouette burning car, then used red, yellow, and orange markers to hatched the fire, later the hatches connected with the black markers (as abstracted smokes). finally I used cold gray on the rest of the edges of the alcohol pool, made it like a reflection scene from the pouring-alcohol bottles. I used fine pointed pen to draw the phone, hands and the bottles. Also, I used pencil on the background to created a smoky feel and also added a smoother texture to contrast to the colorful flame and the surrounded objects.

The only color in the whole drawing is the flame, and the rest of the scene are black and white; I wanted to draw people's attention on the colored parts, but later their sight would transfer to other parts of the drawing because the surrounded objects are tied to the main scene. I felt that my drawing had shown a clear message of the consequences of texting and driving or drinking and driving. Which I hope my poster would notice and warn teenagers to not texting or drinking while they are driving.

In this project, I challenged myself to paint an abstract painting.

I first draw out some figure in the regular drawing paper, and then I simplified the figure that I drew, and then made it as the major focus in the painting that I was going to paint. When I thought of woman, I always think of warm color, so I chose the pinkish tone color as the major color. After I finished the colors, I used bright white as the highlight, and I painted two circle as the female breasts. Overall, I was thinking to add something to the image to make the whole looks more balance. There were too much warm colors, so I used the light blue to created some curved line across the whole surface to balance the heated condition in the image.

This project was actually inspired by Mr. A's word. The other day, I asked him, what is abstract means to him, and he said, abstract is the simplified forms of something. So I did what he said, and tried to understand abstraction step by steps. Overall, I tried hard, and I played around the balance of color and the forms of colors.

In this project, I painted a landscape scene that provided by Mrs.Medsker, because she said that it was the only panel that needs to be finished for the school. And it will be hang in the main hallway.

Originally I was thinking to paint this painting by using the palette knife only, but later I found that the color in the panel actually appears darker than my imagination. So I painted over with red, and restarted it with taping the triangles around the whole panel, and painted each section with pure, solid colors. After I finished painting the cubics shapes of colors, I was thinking whether I should use the oil based color markers oe the oil sticks to draw the details of the islands and the grasses in the bottom part of the image. So, I asked Mrs.Medsker which I should use. She said that the oil stick is more challenging than the oil based color marker, because normally my style of painting just so clean and if I use the marker just like my other painting/drawings. I made a decision to draw with the oil sticks because I really like the texture that the oil sticks have and it might make a contrast with the clean puzzles of colors. And the overall product looks good for me, and I was glad that I did experienced this two materials together.

In this project, I use charcoal to draw the manikin and other still-objects for practice. Personally I think that charcoal is the most difficult material to be use to create art, because when you are drawing with charcoal, you always get a mess, and usually in my art work, you can tell that the lines and even textures are well organized and clean. So I chose it to challenging myself to make a mess.

I used the gray-tone charcoal paper so it originally have a mid-gray value in my drawing. I placed the manikin, the bottle, the light pot and the mouth sculpture in the lightroom, and started use the charcoal to draw out the sketches of the over forms. And then I covered all the area with a light gray value, later I darken the shadow areas, and finally I used the white charcoal to fill in the area with highlights on. I also blended the background and some dark areas. What I found the most difficult was the reflection of the bottle and the see-through area of the bottle. So what I did just roughly added some shadows and highlights, tried to make it look like a bottle, but it did not appears as what I wanted. Originally, I did not want to add highlight with the white charcoal because I was afraid that I would ruin the whole piece. However, I was glad that I tried it, although it was not perfect but at least I knew what is my weakness, and where I still need to improve.

These are the three collages that I made in Photoshop, all the pictures that I used are from google images. I was inspired by Alice In Wonderland, and I wanted to do something different with that story, so I chose to make collages to show my idea. And the main character is the girl with rabbit hat, and the magical red door.

I choose three different area to show my idea of the "magical door", they are the sky, forest and the ocean. I first looked up a open door online, and then I found this red door is the best to fit my collages; I was worrying about the color red would be too bright to shown, but when I see the finished product I kind of like how it looks. Because of the color red, it makes the whole collage looks more intriguing. And then I found a side view of a girl wearing a dress, but she did not have a rabbit hat so I found the rabbit hat and pasted into the girl's head. What I found was the most complex was the layout of the collages, because they were made of different pieces of pictures and some has different shapes than others. But when I finished the first one, I found the pattern of making these collages. Two pieces of photographs will be under the door, and then the objects that represented the theme will goes out of the door, but some will cover the girl and some under the girl. All of these were created in different layers, and when I finished located each objects I flatten them all together as one layer.

Originally, I was planning on working in other pieces for this project after I finished these three collages, but later I felt like I did not have that must of motivation of recreating pieces of work for this project; So I did not finished what I was planned. My thought was creating three pieces of illustrations from these collages and use crayons, and then design three dresses from the same idea. And what was surprised was that working on these collages actually takes longer time than I thought. And I did not want to spend too much time on this because they're just the extension of my inspirations.

In this project, I used oil stick and watercolor as my only materials to draw. And the rule was that we're not allow to use pencil to sketch out the draft that we wanted to draw, we can only use the material besides pencils to draw. And the purpose of this project is to letting us to use a new material to create art work. Second, is to challenge us to draw something expressional without sketching our ideas.

Actually this is my second drawing, I was not very happy about the first one so I restarted in a similar way. I used the brush the wet the paper, an then I just poured in blue and yellow watercolor on the wet paper, and let them mix and defused. The reason I chose blue because the expression i tried to draw is depression and sadness. I used yellow because I hoped the brightness of yellow can help in making contrast in colors.When I started draw the face, I used blue to outlined the shape of the faces and the structure of the whole piece. Then I mixed and blended in white, and I used black to add in values. For the hair, I just simply used blue oil stick to draw out the lines and added values in white and black. I did not want to focus in details in this drawing because I felt like it can still representing the emotions to the guardians even it's rough. What I found was the hardiest was to draw the eyes. Eyes can tell many things and emotions. If I drew the wrong shape of the eyes, then it may not shown what I was expected to show up. And lucky, I did not ruined it. At last I used watercolor on top of the oil sticks; tried to makes some water dripping from the head to the body; to make a feeling of raining to add in the emotions.

After all of these process, I was very happy of how this final product looks, and I really enjoy the way of drawing without use pencil, and just go with it. It's very relax although sometimes I was losing control of drawing it If I have a chance, I would like to draw something really big with this oil stick because I really like the texture that the oil stick it made, and it's very easy to mix color. You can just use one color overlaps on the others, and it gives different colors and values. So I think it would be a lot faster than painting with acrylic paints because you still need to take time to mix colors.

There are three different types of practices drawings. But basically, they are surrounded in pure contour and still-life drawing. And the reason that I chose to do these drawing because I wanted to practice my observation skills, and the application for most of the art and design schools, they want to see your observation skills in pieces of works and your techniques in drawing and your knowledge of art.

September 15, 2016

I drew the different perspectives of a cup in pure contour, and then I went over them in color pencils, and repeated them in the same angles of each little drawings. Kind of like a correction for each drawing. And I can also learnt and knew where I did wrong, and why they are not in the correct perspectives. That can help me to my skills and notice myself to pay attention to these area, so I would not make the same mistakes than the first time.

September 19, 2016

I drew a large beaker with pencil. I lightly sketched out the rough shapes of the beaker and then start shading the values of details. After I finished it, I feel like I need to push more dark values in the shadow of the beaker because everything in the drawing have the similar values, and it makes the whole surface looks flat. So this is also my weakness, and the practice told me that I need to work on this more.

September 21, 2016

Back to pure contour drawings. This is kind of like a review test of what I have done. I just drew down all the objects I saw in fine point pen. And this time I actually paid attentions on details and the shapes of the objects.