art projects!

i took a semester long class in which we focused on drawing what we saw. for one of our final projects, we were tasked with drawing a scene full of light, shadows, and mirrors with willow charcoal. willow charcoal is not easy to draw with, and breaks quite easily. it is much harder to create lines with willow charcoal, but i found that it was very fun to play with the shading, especially with the way that our still life was set up. 

the university of arkansas's studio art foundations program is meant to allow anyone with any amount of artistic experience to eventually major in art. i found that, even without a lot of experience with drawing, and almost none with charcoal, i was able to capture the still life very well with just three months of learning the materials and how to measure objects. i definitely grew in my ability to accurately capture proportions and shades. 

for this project, the assignment was to create a poster in adobe illustrator for one of our favorite songs. i chose charli xcx and shygirl's 365 featuring shygirl from the brat and it's completely different but also still brat album. this album in particular had a very strong visual identity, so i wanted to create something that was similar but also not the same. i added stars and made the focal point of the poster a part of the lyrics, rather than the song's title. i mimicked the album cover style for brat and it's completely different but also still brat by putting charli xcx and brat backwards at the top, but left the rest of the words facing normally. 

this project also asked for an animation, which was created in adobe after effects. for my animation, i wanted to mimic charli xcx's film, the moment, and its intro. the brat albums and film all had such strong visual identities already that i didn't want to make something that looked like it was made by me, but instead create something that was visually very similar to the already existing content. the trailer and opening shots of the moment both featured this sort of flashy text thing, which was also visually consistent with charli xcx's brat tour and sweat tour with troye sivan. i wanted to mimic that on a smaller scale, so i chose to make the stars flash bright blue, red, black, and white. i also made the text for 'partygirl!' flash white and black. 

for my first project in my darkroom class, we gathered objects and laid them directly on top of light-sensitive paper. we made direct contact prints by exposing the paper to light with the objects still on top. for a few of my prints, i played around with adding things and taking things away in the middle of an exposure, sometimes exposing the paper for 5 seconds with a certain set of objects on it and another 5 seconds with a different set of objects on it. i also played around with motion using this same technique by simply shifting where things were on the paper. 

using my photograms, i wanted to tell a story about growing up while keeping it simple enough that it can just look good. as children, i think that people are rushed to grow up and be mature. i used hot wheels f1 cars to show this concept, and created a track out of receipts, tickets, and calculus notes. the receipts and tickets are meant to represent the way to adulthood, as money is seen as an adult thing, but i only picked recipets from when i bought things that may be considered childish, such as lego sets or hot wheels. the calculus notes were from a class (calculus 2) that i failed, but an observer would only know that if i told them. this, to me, represents how failure is such an integral part of life, but the entire goal of most things it to get so good that it doesn't look like you're trying at all. similarly, the calculus notes may look correct to an observer, but to me they represent something i had to work through multiple times to get the result i desired. 

i also did a few photograms just for fun, including the one with my entire earring collection and part of my red bull can tab collection.