Over-Achievment in Art Strikes Back!

So I've finally decided that my world would be a happier place if I just decided not to make everything I ever do a complex masterpiece. But it's a little too late for the two art projects I have to work on over "break". I'll enjoy working on them, and they'll look pretty good by the time I'm done, but that time is a lot sooner than I'd like it to be considering how precise I'm being.

First, we have the photorealism project that was originally supposed to be due the day before Thanksgiving break, but we kept on getting extensions so now it's not due until the second day back from winter "break". This one is the least of my worries time-wise, but it will still be a hassle to get done. Here's the current progress:

The picture on the right is a photo montage I made with an obscene amount of detail (which is hard to see in the picture, I'm not the world's most accomplished photographer). It it now my job to reproduce it in colored pencil onto the paper on the left. I've already made some good progress, and I've done most of the sky which will probably be the hardest part.

Here's a close-up of the bee-homes. I've got to make them a little more orangey, but other than that, they're pretty much done. It's one of my favorite parts of the composition.

And here we have the two skies compared. The colored pencil one needs to me darker before it's done, but I'm happy with how it's coming along.

Now for a preview of my current project. Sometimes I debate whether or not there's any chance of it being done by the end of the quarter, but that's depressing so I normally switch thoughts quite quickly. For the project, we choose an artist whose style we want to imitate, and then we paint a self-portrait on a 24" x 30" canvas. The artist I chose had two main styles: using tiny dots of primary color to cover the entire canvas and produce the visual effect of other colors, and the use of small squares (normally about a quarter inch by a quarter inch) of mixed color to produce a mosaic-like final effect. I chose the latter style because it's slightly less time-consuming, but let's take a look at what I've managed to accomplish in about 9-11 hours:

This is all I've gotten done. The canvas is about twice as wide as the wave, and there's still about 8-12 inches above it too, so I don't really have much accomplished.

As you can probably see, this is a portion of the painting. The squares are about three-quarters the size of the real ones. You can see the little dots of white between the squares that I need to fill in. On the other parts of the canvas, I'm underglazing it with a watered down coat of paint so I don't have to worry about the white specks.

Let's play find the artist! The paint on my hand has worn off to some degree, but while I was painting earlier it served as a test palette, so it was entirely covered in tiny squares the colors of the waves. One of my friends suggested that we cover my arm in the squares, hold it up to the canvas, and have people try to find the arm. He called his game find the artist.