First Contract Done!

Wow. OK. That was interesting.

I finished my first Honors Art contract guys. We critiqued yesterday, today, and will hopefully finish tomorrow. Then on to the next contract!!

I apologize I do not have pictures yet of the final product because it is hanging in the gallery at my school. When I get a chance I will snap a photo to share. I cannot say I am completely content with the result of my efforts. I am probably just being really critical... people gave me compliments. I think critique really helped me to see my work differently and notice things I did well instead of focusing on my mistakes...

OK random interjection: As an artist DO NOT focus on your mistakes! They are about 10% or less of your work and to others they look like they were meant to be there! I do this all the time and it shuts down my creativity and makes me feel really depressed. Focus on what you did well...because, guess what, you did a lot well!

...OK back to blog post. Yeah now I like my paintings better.

I struggled a lot through this contract and because of this I will be changing my subject to architecture with a focus on castles and fairytales.

Have a happy week and I will post pics soon!

Sarah

Update on contract and other randomness

Hey!

I updated my watercolor and ceramics pages with more of my past works if you want to go check them out!

I have also almost finished my second painting for my contract...just need to add some sky and more contrast within the woods!

In the process of working on this one I managed to splatter the sky of the other one next to it with grey paint right next to the left tree :( grrr... Oh well I guess I can add some birds :)

Also cute baby...many moons ago I found this picture of a baby and then I found it again last night and its giggling eyes just brightened my day. I needed some stress reliever so I drew the face. (the original is even cuter) One out of ten people said the baby was creepy....WHAT!? Its all pudgy and cute.

Have a happy week! And if you live in snowy place keep warm and build snowmen! If you live in a warm place do whatever you do when you don't have snowmen to build.

Sarah

Contracts and Art

So Honors Art is in full swing now. We completed our first and only guided assignment, which I talked about in my previous post.

We are now working on our first contract. A contract is basically what it sounds like, an agreement to something, and in this particular case, a self designed art assignment.

Now contracts are much more complicated than that. We have to fill out the size and number of pieces we will be creating, what the subject will be, what the medium will be, etc. We then have to sign and say that this will be what we work on for the next couple of weeks. Not only that but these pieces must in some way related to all the work we create in our other contracts (there are four).

It is really stressful, but very exciting. The first contract is helping everyone, myself included, to really examine what our ideas were for our semester of work and whether or not they will work well.

Here is what I am working on so far. I am about half way done. When I get closer to being finished I will give more details on what the meaning and reason for this subject is.

In the top left picture are the two paintings I am currently working on. There will be another one added soon with the same subject. The top right painting is finished and the bottom left painting is about half way done. The kind of messy random way that the unfinished one looks is the way that the finished one looked to begin with.

Have a lovely week!

Sarah

M&M's and Body Art

Ok so I lied, it is not the weekend anymore. Sorry.

Here is the story.

Our art class was assigned to create a "Body of Work". After some intense staring at the ceiling I landed upon the idea of some sort of dancer as the subject of my work. I was thinking that I would include doodles, henna fashion, with an Identi Pen (small and large tipped, can probably be found in most art stores).

I also thought that I would glue chunks of paper with a color wash in watercolor on for the background. Below is my strange strategy for doing that. I basically just sprayed them with water and then put some water on and let it bleed down.

I rejected this idea when I realized it would be rather hard to do detailed doodles on such  a rough surface. And then the M&M's began... Basically I walked to the living room stared at my painting trying to come up with an idea I felt comfortable with and then wanted more M&M's so I would venture to the kitchen to get some more. This happened at least ten times.

I finally did get a rough sketch down that I had to keep tweaking to get the body proportions right. Below are the pictures I took of the process once I got started.

I wanted to emphasize that the female's body does not have to be perfect, which is why some things are not completely in proportion with the typical photo-shopped body we see a lot in media. I tried to make the legs shorter especially.

The final product is mounted on black paper (the only thing big enough to frame it) and hanging on the wall in my high school's art department gallery.

First project done and starting on the next!

Have a happy week!

Sarah

Honors Art!

Hello!!

So I got into Honors Art! I will be posting what is going on with assignments or contracts as they are called for our class. I actually just finished our first one today called "A Body of Work", which is as it says, art work focused on the body. I will post some pictures of the process later this week end. It involves lots of peanut M&M's...

Happy Thursday!

Sarah