So these are two more pieces from my AP Studio Art concentration. The top one is my field hockey stick with a ball resting on it. The bottom image is a morph of the tinker toys I used to play with when I was a kid into the real thing. In this case, I used to build a tinker toy lawnmower, and run around the house with it, so I tried to show the progression of it transforming into the real lawnmower I imagined it to be. It was a new idea that I had, so I decided to try it out. I thought it would be another idea that fit with the "childhood memories" sort of theme that I am going for.
Not only was this one of the first pieces that I did in pastel, but it was also one of the first pieces that I did in color. The toughest part of this piece was definitely the different highlights and shadows on the bottle. I can't even count how many times I had to go over and over those to get them right. I think I could've spent more time on the background, which I kind of rushed, but I had to keep moving if I wanted to keep up with the demanding pace of AP Art.
Actually, there's a pretty funny and kinda gross story that goes along with this piece :P. My art teacher brought in this giant pumpkin for another drawing class, and it had been sitting in school for a couple weeks. Then I asked if I could draw it, so it sat there for another week and a half. The day before I finished this piece, I asked the teacher if I could have it for just one more day, because she really wanted to take it home with her. Well, that one more day ended up being one day too long. I came into school the next day, and there was a really bad smell. That's when I noticed that the pumpkin was leaking all over the table! It had essentially rotted, and was leaking fermented pumpkin juice all over the place, although you would never be able to tell by just looking at it. I thought pumpkins kept for more than a few weeks! We get pumpkins for Halloween and they lasted a couple months! I felt terrible, but we cleaned it up and put that day down as just another interesting (and slightly gross) day in art class haha. My teacher was really nice though, and fortunately wasn't upset :]
So here's another sketchbook assignment from about a year ago. I think at that point in the class, we could draw whatever we wanted, so I drew my airbrush. I really concentrated on the crisp highlights and shadows, and I think I ended up capturing it well.
So here's some bonus content. These are some quick sketches I did for the Flash Animation class I am taking in school. We're currently working on a partner project, and these were the elements I was in charge of designing. Sketching and adding value to the two characters and the spaceship probably took somewhere around 45 minutes. They were pretty quick (which is evident from the big guy's severely mal-proportioned arm haha, and the very simple ship). It's only a small, school assignment though, so I wasn't concerned with making everything perfect. I then went back and overlayed some color, which probably took a half hour at most.
All of this was done in photoshop on my wacom tablet. I could've spent a lot more time on these, because they're really rough and there's a million ways to improve them, but it worked fine for the school assignment. (I also had an extremely limited amount of time to work on them). I just figured it would be interesting for you guys to see some digital, cartoony, work rather than my usual realistic, traditional work.
So back to some more traditional art. This is the second acrylic painting I have ever done in my life (which, so far, is not many haha). The school assignment was to make a fantasy landscape. It could be anything we imagined, as long as it was some type of environment. I chose to go with a barren, icy tundra with a hulking, jagged projection of ice in the foreground, and jagged, icy, mountains in the background. Some reference pictures of actual icebergs helped with the color and texture of the ice, but most of the painting came straight out of my head. I am relatively happy with how it came out, however I believe the mountains in the background could use a bit of help. (It was my first attempt at painting any type of mountain, and I quickly figured out that they are rather difficult to paint correctly. Some more practice in that area is definitely needed :] haha)
This project was extremely fun to do, because it was one of the few things that we've done all year that wasn't based on some type of realism, or focused upon some type of technique or subject matter. The project was extremely open-ended, and allowed for some extra creativity, which is always a plus. This piece is also more like the kind of art I want to do more of, so I was very excited to get started.
So here's even more variety! This was some Harry Potter fan art that I did about a year and a half ago. (If you aren't familiar with Harry Potter, it's a dementor, as I originally envisioned it in my head). I used a Wacom Intuous 4 graphics tablet to draw this digitally in Photoshop CS4. The dementor was drawn entirely in Photoshop, from sketch to finish, using a few different layers and simple brushes. The background was a combination of a cloud brush I have and some filters, all different colors and at different opacities. I would consider this to be my first real digital painting, and I was very proud of how it came out.
I wish I had more of this type of work to show now, but with school, and sports, and the other thousand things I do, I don't have too much spare time for my own art. So, this will probably be the only digital art for some time. I hope to do more digital art once I graduate from high school in June. But for the upcoming weeks, I will be back to posting my schoolwork: traditional pieces of some kind or another.
As always, thoughts and feedback would be awesome!
