Art Projects
2024-2025
Project #1
The first art project of the year was drawing a picture with contour lines and zentangle patterns. In the picture I used a triadic color scheme of purple, orange, and green, to make the picture pop. The drawing includes the top of a grand piano, the cap of a sharpie, and part of a keychain my friend gave me. All three items are valuable to me because the keychain represents my close friendships, and the sharpie and piano represent my passion for music and art. When I first started the piece, I was a little nervous that it would come out weird because I usually never make colorful and vivid artwork, so this came out a lot better than I expected.
Project #2
The second project is a water color painting made using the ink-blowing technique. It was initially supposed to be a practice paper but turned into my final project. The idea was rainbow rain falling down from the top of the picture. But after it didn't come out how I expected it to, I decided to change it. Instead, the rain is rainbow trees, with more detailed black trees covering them, and a reddish moon and red and black clouds in the sky. The colorful trees could also be interpreted as thunder falling from the clouds and the color at the base of the trees is a fire or undergrowth.
Project #3
The Clay Pallet Project was a project where the class had to make a clay pallet to use as an art pallet for later art projects. I decided to make a pallet in the shape of a unicorn because I wear a lot of shirts with unicorns on them. I made the clay pallet by starting off with making the basic shape of the unicorn, then added the wells using different tools. After firing it up, I added glaze, then fired it up again. This is the first time I have ever worked with clay, so I think I did good considering it's the first time I have used clay. If I were to do this again, I think I would have made the wells deeper and bigger, since the first time I didn't know how much it would shrink after getting fired up.
The fourth project is a Bob Ross painting. To make the painting, I followed along with a Bob Ross video of him painting. The painting was made with different types of brushes and a pallet knife. I used the pallet knife to make the snow on the mountains, and the different types of brushes to make the textures of the trees and clouds. The painting doesn't look like what I imagined it to look like and was filled with many mistakes that I had to fix later. However, I also don't have much experience in painting so I wasn't surprised, so I think overall I did good.
Project #4
Project #5
The fifth project is a birds-eye perspective drawing. It started out as a practice sketch, but I touched up on it and turned it into a final picture. The picture has several building of different heights, sizes, and windows next to a road in the middle of the picture, with another road parallel to it and another intersecting it. I made the picture by using orthogonal lines and a ruler to make them straight, then adding more details to the buildings. The buildings were then shaded with and then smoothed out with an eraser and my finger, making the picture pop more. Since many of the lines faded out during the drawing process, I then went in and made all the lines darker so they were more defined. I think I shaded the buildings well and did the perspective correctly, but I could've made the lines more clear and made the picture less sketchy looking.
Project #6
This next piece is a felt project. First, I made a practice project to figure out how to make a felt sculpture. The practice project is a pink cat with white markings and yellow eyes. To make it, I cut out each part, and then added stuffing and sewed them together with a basic running stitch.
After I finished making the cat, I made the actual felt sculpture. The felt sculpture is a pancake on a plate with butter, syrup and two strawberries on top of it. I made it by cutting out the different pieces again, but this time I made two copies of each piece. This was so I could stitch them together and put stuffing in them, making the piece 3-d. The parts were stitched together with a running stitch or a blanket stitch, depending on what the pieces were. After I made each piece, I sewed them together.
I think the sculpture came out well, even though it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I didn't expect attaching each part together to be difficult. If I were to do this again I would put less stuffing because many parts of the pancake sculpture are popping up a lot.
Project #7
This project is two watercolor paintings-a blue and green picture with a forest with mountains in the back and a lake in the front, and a sunset colored picture, a lake, a tree in the front and mountains behind it. To make them, I watched a a tutorial and alternated between the two canvas's so they had time to dry. I made it have a white frame by putting tape on it before I started painting. The paper used was watercolor paper and I used different types of brushes to make the different patterns. I found painting these to be very challenging because I'm not good at using watercolors. Specifically, I found making lighter colors hard to do, but mixing other darker shades was easier. I like the overall piece because the different colors came out well and you can still tell what's going on in the picture.
Project #8
The next project is a linoleum painting practice piece. It is a white piece of paper with six copies of a campfire and four marshmallows on a stick surrounding it. The entire design is done in red paint. I made the picture by first sketching the campfire design, then copying that sketch on to wax paper. Then, I put the wax paper on the piece of linoleum so that the sketch would transfer to it. To make the carving, I used a linoleum carving tool to cut out the wax. After making the carving, I tried printing it on a piece of paper, then fixed the linoleum piece where there were places I didn't want paint at. Once I finished the piece, I made the final product by rolling paint on a paper with a paint roller to get a thin layer of paint, rolling it onto the linoleum, then turning the linoleum over on the paper and flattening it down, taking it off, then repeating that process. I found this project very challenging because it was hard to cut through the linoleum and make a clean print.
Project #9
The final project for the linoleum painting piece is a Loteria card. Loteria is a traditional Mexican board game similar to bingo. The class voted on a theme for a Loteria game and decided on doing album covers. I decided on doing the album cover of Codex by Joel Sunny. The cover is a picture of Joel Sunny holding a book open. To make the print, I drew the design on a piece of paper, then turned it over and put it on the linoleum block, drew over the backside of the paper, and a pencil design of the picture appeared on the block. To do the carving, I used a linoleum carver to carve out the picture. Then, I rolled ink over the block, put it face down on a paper and took the block off, making an ink painting of the album cover on the piece of paper. I repeated that 5 times to have a total of 6 paintings of the picture, all in different combinations of ink color and paper color. The hardest part about the project was doing a clean print because unwanted lines kept showing up on the paper and decreasing the quality of the print.
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Project #10
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This is a surrealism painting. The painting shows multiple colored skull representing planets with rings around them, and flying squirrels with leaves for wings. I had to randomly pick a background and a letter for the objects in the painting to come up with what would be in it, and I picked a space background and the letter x. The skulls represent the element Xenon which is a toxic element, the squirrels are from a genus of squirrels called Xerus, and the leaves represent xanthophyll, a pigment that cause leaves to turn to autumn colors. To make the picture, I first made a very light sketch, and then colored all the objects and space with watercolor. Then, I went over all the objects again with colored pencils to do the details. The colored pencils used are Prisma colored pencils. After coloring everything, I used a white paint marker to add the stars. This project was challenging because I'm not good at using colored pencils and drawing objects realistically, and finding the right watercolors was hard. Overall, I am proud of this picture because everything worked out and it came together nicely.
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Project #11
The next project is a graffiti project where we had to make a graffiti design with cardboard and draw it on paper. To make it, I first drew the design on a piece of paper, then used a ligthbox to copy it on another piece of paper. I colored the first copy using prisma colored pencils and crayola markers. For the second copy, I traced it on a piece of cardboard, cut out that design, then cut off what I had just traced with the paper, and repeated the process. Eventually I had three pieces of cardboard. The first piece of cardboard I painted blue because it was just the background. The second piece of carboard was the flowers, so I painted the flowers different colors. Some of them needed two layers of paint because the paint wasn't thick enough. Then I painted the letters and used a darker shade for the perspective part, and used a white paint marker for the lines. I then hot-glued the pieces together and put small stacks of cardboard in between to make it pop. One thing I struggled with in the project was cutting out the pieces. Overall, I am happy with how the project came out because the colors all go together and I've never made graffiti before.
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