My Artwork

Last week, I re-decorated my walls in artwork. After a few hours of hammering my task was complete. And now I give you pictures of the 20 pieces of art on my walls. I apologize for the poor lighting in some of the pictures, but my room doesn't get much natural light after 9 AM and my lamps emit a very yellowish light that isn't much good for this sort of thing. I have presented them in the order in which they were created.

This is one of the few with a title. I call it Orange Pangea. It was made either during the summer before ninth grade or the summer before eighth grade. Technically, it's made out of trash, but as an artist I can do pretty much anything I want in the name of art. I peeled an orange, tore the peel into little pieces, pressed them for a few weeks, and then glued the pieces onto a cardboard square painted with interesting watercolor effects. The green sepals at the top were painted on with acrylics.

This was my first real project of my high school career. Really, it's more of an exercise in the use of line, but I like how it turned out. The assignment was to trace the outlines of a picture given to us by the teacher and fill it in with various types of line using Sharpies. It's hard to see all the detail in this photo, but it's interesting close up.

This was called The Lip Dude by my classmates, and the name stuck. For this we had to pick a 9x12 picture from the teacher's stack and draw it double the size using a grid for guidelines. The medium was ebony pencil.

This was also done my freshman year. The assignment was to demonstrate understanding of perspective in some way using colored pencil. The only evidence of actual technical one-point perspective in mine is the alternating black and white rectangular planes and the block letters on either side of the tree, so this wasn't exactly what the teacher had in mind, but she liked how I changed it to be more unique. I could have gotten away with murder in that class if it was artistically and originally done. It's hard to see it in this picture, but I'm really proud of how the sun turned out.

This was simply a study in color theory using tempera paints. We could divide our matboard however we wanted as long as we had four equal sized pieces: one in a monochromatic color scheme, one in a complementary color scheme, one in cool colors, and one in warm colors. I didn't like how choppy the other students' looked, so I went an extra step and tried to unify the four parts - thus the greyscale, dark, light, and black-and-white strips across the painting. At one point I named it, but I've forgotten its name. It had something to do with lava lamps, I believe.

This little fellow was my first experience with linoleum printing. I have mixed feeling about this medium. I love the carving process, but I don't like the texture of the finished product. It really aggravates me for some reason. It's kind of gritty and just... weird and aggravating.

This is the actual linoleum print that made the armadillo. I painted it with acrylics. It's mounted on plywood to make the printing process easier, but it likes to fall off of the wall due to its thickness.

This was the final project of my freshman year: an imitation of a painting using acrylic paints. I chose one of van Gogh's early pieces. I have no idea what it's called. It ended up looking very similar considering that I was only fourteen, but I was pressed for time so I had to let some things slide.

This is from last year. It's simply a negative space drawing of a fake palm with the negative space shaded in with pastel. If you were to look at the original, you would observe a speckled appearance to the pastel. This is how I learned that you really need to use aerosol hair spray - not spray hair gel - as a fixative. The top right corner of the picture is actually what I made up in my mind the night before the assignment was due. My teacher said time was up and put the tree back in the closet, but I wasn't done, so I had to use my imagination for the rest. It shows.

There's not much to talk about here. We took five pieces of watercolor paper and painted each a different shade of one color and then ripped them up to use as mosaic pieces to make a self-portrait. This one has a name too. It's called Mosaic Me.

This is called I hate you Ms. Althoff because I put hours upon hours of work into this beautiful landscape but I can't do anything with it but look at it because you had us using copyrighted images. Actually, pretty much everything I did my freshman year along with this piece from my sophomore year can't be entered in most contests because the picture we were working from were all copyrighted images. Thanks Ms. Althoff. This is a 9x12 colored pencil landscape made from a 1.5x2 snippet from another picture. The background is my favorite part color-wise, but it's all black in this photo.

This is my hand drawn with four different objects, each shaded a different way. There's the whelk shaded with inks using the hatching technique, the doorknob drawn in ink with a weighted contour line, the skateboard axle in normal pencil, and the pencil sharpener stippled with ink.

This is a white skull wearing a light tan hat against a white box, all shaded with various ink strokes. I had some serious issues bringing the darks into my composition because of the reality of the still life, but I may go come back to it and pretend it was a dark hat. It will work nicely as a portfolio piece if I take AP Portfolio next year. This was actually done based on a fully shaded graphite drawing of the same thing, but I gave that to my mom because she wanted to hang it, but I'm not sure where it is now.

This medium is one of my favorites: scratchboard. I find it to be extremely easy and fast, and it can also be used to do interesting things with movement, expression, and the like. After I finished this, I realized the eye was lacking eyelashes, but my teacher told me to forget about it since it was just an extra credit assignment and we had to move on. The "actual" project I turned in for that unit was a scratchboard of an orange daylily. I have no pictures of it because it is currently on display in the office of a company that sponsors a contest I entered it in.

For this, we used white colored pencil on black paper and drew a still life of shiny objects. I came in countless hours after school to work on mine, and I'm proud of the results. It could definitely be lighter. I tend to have this issue a lot. If the paper starts out white, the end result is a project that's too light; if the the paper starts dark, the end result is too dark; you'll see later that if the paper starts grey, the end result is too grey.

This was my first homework assignment this year. As advanced drawing and painting students, we get biweekly homework projects. At the beginning of the semester we get a sheet of topics such as close-up of an insect, potted plant, or self-portrait in harsh lighting (that's what this one is). Every two weeks we turn in our sketchbooks with a fully developed piece on one of those topics. Graphite is the most common medium, but I've used colored pencils and torn paper before, and one guy used markers once. My teachers chose this as one of the pieces from my school to be entered into a student exhibition at a local college during the winter.

This is a contour line drawing of some shoes that we did at the beginning of this year as an exercise. My table-mates and I decided that the fringe on the boot was satanic fringe straight from the pits of hell. It liked to move when we weren't watching it. At one point, we all decided that we were just going to put the fringe wherever we wanted instead of drawing strictly from the actual shoe, much to the amusement of the other art teacher.

This project is how I got tendonitis in my wrist, which I neglected for weeks until the swelling caused some carpal tunnel and the pain became so excruciating that I cried when I moved my wrist. If I'm forced to tears because of physical pain, something is drastically wrong. If I were smarter, I probably should have done something before it got to that point, but I have inherited from my grandpa the philosophy that if I ignore pain long enough it will go away. We shaded the paper entirely grey first (I used the blending stump improperly and with far too much pressure during this stage, which is how I hurt myself) and then made it darker and lighter to form the still life. The glare in the corner kind of messes up the overall effect, but it was a boring corner so you're not missing much action. I definitely used a full range of values, but it would not have hurt to have more extreme lights and darks.

This is the most recent full project that I have at home. My teacher has one on display and one in storage for our spring art show, and I have one in progress at school and one that was due in January, but I turned it in incomplete to be graded and now I can work on it for however long I like. This was a really fun, non-objective project. At first I flipped out because we weren't allowed to plan it in advance (I did to some extent anyway), we had to work with it as we went. I ended up really loving the fact that I didn't have a specific end goal. It's really hard to explain without showing the steps, so I won't do so at this time. Maybe I will later.