Q4 Art

This quarter featured an interesting idea of practicing one element of art for each assignment, and then using all of those skills to create one piece in the end. This has caused each piece of art I have created to be a unique experience.

The first piece of art I have created was a figure of a man in a suit and fedora looking out while shielding his eyes with his hand. I’ve heard the phrase, “suffer for your art,” before. If by “suffer,” you mean, “became highly uncomfortable by the surprising number of photos of people either naked or scantily clad on that website,” then I have suffered for this piece of art. In fact, I just chose one pose to reference and tried to draw it from memory to avoid glimpsing any more nude photos that could mentally scar me. That aside, I created two versions of “Figure of a Suit Man.” Noticing that the examples I saw in the assignment didn’t focus too much on facial features, I gave him sunglasses in the first one, and the second one, I just obscured his face with shadow. I also decided to swap the shades of the pants and shoes in the second version. I also took the opportunity to practice shading/making shadows in my art.

My next art piece is exactly what the title implies: a bunch of shapes and colors. I spent an hour messing around with circles, squares, and different colors and seeing what I made. I would have done it longer, but I was experiencing technical difficulties when I tried using it on Day 2. Some of the more noteworthy pieces were one featuring the outlines of circles and squares that took on a blueprint-like look, one where I put rectangles in larger rectangles to make it look like they were stacked on top of each other. There was another one where I used a similar strategy, but I used all the colors of the rainbow instead of fire colors.

The Dragon and the Bird was drawn to show the illusion of space. I went for showing off size, drawing the bird as a tiny speck to show how massive the dragon was compared to it. I tried drawing the dragon’s hind leg in the picture, but it came out awkward, so I drew it so the tail was obscuring the hind leg. This piece of art also helped me practice drawing backgrounds as well as eyes and folded dragon wings.

The hardest part of the Vegetable Still Life Recreation was deciding where and how to incorporate the textures. I could think of an idea on how to incorporate some, but not all, of the textures into the piece. For example, I used the first texture, which consisted of simple lines and dots strewn about, for the texture of an orange’s skin. I also used the one with vertical lines stacked on top of each other to represent tree bark, and the alternating vertical and horizontal lines to illustrate a checkerboard-patterned tablecloth. I also tried to use the textures in the vegetables themselves, like the onion half, as well as the scenery.

I decided to recreate an image of a shaded sphere on a table on the website, since it seemed like an easy project to practice on. I shaded the sphere using the method practiced in a past shading practice assignment, where I used four different tones of shade: light, semi-light, semi-dark, and dark. I used the strategy of mapping out each shaded part, erasing the borders, and then shading it in.

The final piece that incorporates all of the skills practiced in the previous assignments is known as Griffin at Sunset. It is tied with The Phoenix and The Dragon and the Bird as my favorite project of this quarter. I was going to draw a phoenix at first, but I decided to practice drawing a different mythical creature. I used each skill in the order they were learned as I drew the picture. First, I drew the outline of the griffin. Next, I added things like the eye and feather detail on the lines. Then, I added the wing and other body details. I drew out the background, making the tree and castle smaller than the griffin to give the illusion that they were farther away. I then added texture to the griffin’s feathers and fur, the castle, the tree branch, and the leaves in the wind. Finally, I added shadows and color to the drawing. I also colored the parts where the sunlight hit lighter than the rest.