A Little Birdie Told Me...

Alright so I'm in between two projects right now. I think in my last post I mentioned the first one (?) but in case I didn't  it's the middle crinoid from my previous colored pencil work that I promised to finish on black paper and it will be drawn with pastel colored pencils. (light colors) The sketches above are for my other project, which is inspired by the mountains and galleries of Park city, Utah. ( my dad and I went on a ski trip there over the President's day weekend) The mountains where HUGE! and extensive, they seemed to go on forever. Driving between them made my dad and I feet so small. ( imagine what it must've been like for the pioneers) so anyway, the photos of the mountains by themselves were boring, I did a couple sketches for picture ideas and shot some photos of a bird i saw at lunch while we were skiing at Deer ski mountain. Then dad and I went to Park city to see the galleries and I was really inspired by this one artists style with mixed media. she used this cool patterned fabric which would show through these super colorful landscapes so I thought I'd try it and enforce some of the techniques I read about on how to make artwork based off photographs. that last colored picture is made with acrylic. I used yellow and red/ littleblue first then applied solid blue as my layer sequence. (they're mostly diluted)

Now or Never

ya I know I had somewhere around 6 posts about finishing this :P I don't completely understand why, maybe I sat in front of it for too long, but I lost interest/ love for this picture. One thing I understand now though is that sometimes a piece your working on can be like you looking at the sun. After a while it's not pretty anymore, it hurts your eyes and you have to look away. In my case, i had too look away from that super cool fossil and supertaunting picture for a couple weeks. Then last wed we had a snowday and it was raining and there was this weird progression from "wow the sound of falling ice and branches can be really relaxing sometimes" to "isn't it funny how now that the pressure of me finishing that crinoid is off me I suddenly want to finish it?" and then I woke up and turned on the T.V. and it all went down hill from there
on the upside though I did a pretty good sketch of an old guy named Albert who isn't eating a tortilla

it's a picture of his dead wife Peggy

oh and i also drew this with pastelle, I lost the better digital copy and this looks alot browner and yellowier but the scanner picked up too much of the dark hues I used to make the shadows

Statue's Eye and Roots & Yarn Tangles

the first painting is an oil still life painting my teacher set up. Like the set ups my professors put together at UArts, Doc took tones of random but visually appealing objects on top of a table covered with the green velvet curtain which was pinned to the wall. This piece was just 1/3 of the total setup. It took somewhere around two weeks, and after a while without looking at it, I went back with fresh eyes to fix the areas that called for it. I do realize that the bottom left corner doesn't match the color tone of the right, half of that is the lighting but I ran out of the Olive green when i was tweaking it so it's become a little more prominent.

This was an acrylic piece that I started waaay back in... October? (There's a post of this in it's early stages, maybe you recognize it) anyway Doc wanted to see more work done in less time so i put this on hold for a while and went back to it around the same time I did the oil still life.
I've also been doing some illustrations but I don't have a copy of them yet so I'll upload them at a later date

I will finish this today

I cannot give a time, but today I WILL poast my Trilobite piece. The only thing keeping me from finishing it is me and I will NOT hold myself back any longer! (it does help to have all music and no tv sounds though, thats taken care of)

DAR stamp design

MY DAR STAMP! (Daughters of American Revolution society)
so, every year our art class takes part in the contest and every time its a different theme. This time the theme was Reserving American History. so at first I thought of drawing a design with a history teacher holding a text book in one arm and gesturing with the other making look like he's really into whatever historic story he's telling the students and in the background is a scene of the founding fathers writing the constitution. didn't turn out too great. Then I thought of a picture my friend Hannah J took while she was at UArts that had the liberty bell in it and figured eh, I'll grab a quote and go with it. (most artists advise against making artwork based on photographs because you don't have much power in controlling the composition and other factors like lighting but at this point I really needed the darn thing done and Hannah's an awesome photographer so i wasn't too concerned) and to my surprise it came out pretty awesome [THANK YOU HANNAH!] but it still didn't really fit the theme so I stuck a tourist snapping a photo in it which gave it some spacial balance

and yes I know I have no sense in fonts
In other news: my crinoid should be done fri or sat and I'm going to be interviewed at Rowan this Sunday. ironically that's the same day NJ's been promised arctic chill and we've been advised to stay home and drink hot cocoa :P I'm sure it will be fun anyway

LETS GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROAD

motivational post, this is a little view of the colors I'm using for the crinoids I sketched and posted previously. can't seem to get very far though. maybe i'm feeling pressured to keep it light(?) anyways, i'll try to finish it sometime this week

sneak peek (haha and the spell check doesn't recognize what Crinoid is)

This is the final sketch of my next project which will be color pencil maybe accented with some water color (still working that out). Its based off another of my dads fossil collection called a Crinoid(aka Sea Lilly), and it's one of the most interesting  because the earth pushed the crinoids in all different directions almost giving you a different point of view to every side of them  and i think there are three different species (depending whether the octopus looking one is the same as the biggest one or if it looks like an octopus all around)