Creativity with Playing Cards

I do not like the subject of this piece. After seeing what others in my not-class did, I feel really unoriginal in that all I did was cut up the cards into a sort of interesting composition and then draw them. I feel like I should have been able to do something more creative with this assignment, but playing cards... are just playing cards, to me. I have trouble seeing them as anything else. Anyway, this is done with sharpie(red and black) and highlighter(yellow). I felt only markers would be able to provide the shockingly bold and bright colors I desired for this piece. I struggled a lot with the perspective and details of the cards, as I am bad at both. My eyes are either too close together or too far apart, because when I stared at the cards to draw them, I saw two images barely overlapping instead of the one, 3-D image. I probably need glasses. Ugh. I stippled some shading on this after I drew the cards, and I think it gives it a nice look. Though I don't like the subject of this drawing, I do like the results... it looks pretty, if nothing else.

No Brush: Fruit

 I used mostly a palette knife and a little bit of plastic knife to paint this piece, using colors I mixed myself out of only the primary colors; blue, yellow, and red. I believe I was told this was only for practice, but it turned out to be much more than that for me, and I consider this to be one of my all-time favorite pieces. I love the stained-glass feel and the warmth of the colors. I think I actually enjoyed using the spatula more than I would a brush! I don't think I originally intended for this to look like a smile, I just wanted to have varying colors that would not require me to paint a complex pattern. However, in the end, it does look like a very happy fruit monster, and I'm not unhappy that it does look that way. I LOVED this project, and hope to do more like it.

Summerwork: Live Portrait and Design of Initials

These two very different drawings were done as an over-summer assignment... which I was unaware of, so I had to do them the first week of school. I wonder if they would be better if I had known and started work earlier. Knowing what a horrible procrastinator I am, I doubt it.

• I was a little confused about the prompt for this drawing at first, but it turned out alright. This is a writing pencil and black colored pencil(I think that's my favorite medium) piece. The figure in said piece is one of my friends, Kyla Campbell, who graciously thought about horrible and depressing things for over an hour so she could look sad and thoughtful for me. I have both good and bad feelings for this piece. On one hand, it definitely looks like the model I was trying to draw, but on the other hand I scrunched up her facial features and made the lines of her face too dark where they should have blended and faded out more. I really liked the background for this, but I wish I had spent a second more on her earring, which is designed to look like a zipper(so cool). I didn't draw the fly-aways of her hair, so it looks almost like she's wearing a solid piece, but I like the lighting of it and the texture I managed to convey.

 

• These are my initials, in cursive. I used a sharpie pen, a box of colored pencils, and a light table(which I didn't know existed until the day I used it, I love light tables now) to trace the bigger sets over and over again. I wanted to make them look like ribbons, but my shading made them look thicker, like statues. I really like how the colors and placing make it looks like there are hundreds more of these little initial sets all around the window of the paper. I also like how the colors I chose contradict and compliment each other. When I read the prompt for this I thought it would have to be much more complicated, but it turned out that it is beautiful in its simplicity(or at least I think it is).

Sketchbook Hands: Soft, Sharp, and Unexpected.

 Each of these is a simple drawing of my hand holding an object. I tried to do different positioning of my hand and changing the way my hand was holding the objects to get very different looking images. I drew all of them with average writing pencils at first, then went over them with another medium that I felt would compliment the texture of the object being held.

• The one with the draw-string bag in the upper left is done over in drawing pencil. While I think the proportions on the thumb are extremely off, and the arm looks odd but I can't quite figure out why that is, I like this one the best. I think it does look soft, as it was meant to, and I love how the bag looks like a bag.

• The picture on the bottom with the arrowhead was a pain to draw, literally. The point on that thing was really sharp, making it a perfect choice for this particular drawing. I chose to use sharpie as my final medium to give it a stark contrast that would accent the sharp-ness. I don't like the angle of the hand in this one and I think I should have just done the same kind of darkened border as I did with the other two drawings. I also don't like how chubby and segmented I made my fingers look by doing the creases too darkly. I do think the fingers look very much like fingers and the arrowhead looks like obsidian, however, so I don't think this drawing was a complete failure.

• The picture in the top right is of (my hand and) a necklace I have. The necklace "chain" is some sort of rubber rope, which is why it is stiff and sticks out from my hand like that. The cat charm on it is turned around so that you see its back. I thought this might fit the unexpected theme because you always expect to see the front of things. I used a black colored pencil to finish this. Though I was a little rushed with this drawing, I rather like how it turned out. I had to redraw my hand several times before I felt like I had gotten the proportions right. I do wish that I had pulled my sleeve up a little bit, because the space in the border where my arm leaves the paper feels wrong.