Globalicious

This is what I made with a 'brush' of my globe pencil sharpener.  It relates to me because I love ice cream and food, so I made globe cones!

Well that's wacky...Fun Friday

Apex High: Home of the C{OW}ugars

For this project, I worked with my friend Ambika to take pictures with the same background.  For each one, I moved to a different place and a different position.  Later I photoshopped each 'Claire' into one picture for an overall piece that, well, shows who I am!  The hardest part of this assignment was cropping each 'Claire' so that the old background was completely gone.  Also, I had to move them around a lot to fit them in so they looked natural.  To overcome this, I zoomed in and slowly deleted the area I did not need.  If I were to redo this project, I would've tried harder to get higher resolution pictures to avoid all of the pixels that make this a tad bit blurry.  Overall, I think it was a cool and fun project to do!

feat. Ambika.  She owns the school.

One Mean Meal

For this project, we followed a tutorial that showed the basics of Photoshop.  The most difficult part about this project was finding a way to make the mouth and eyes I added look like they were really a part of the pancakes.  I overcame these problems by zooming in closely and using the liquify and eraser tools.  The liquify tool was used to spread out the pancake stack and provide an open area for the mouth.  I used the eraser tool to smooth out the edges and blend them into the pancakes.  If I were to redo this project, I would have tried to come up with a more creative idea than keeping the pancakes as in the original tutorial.  I feel like a different food or subject with teeth would have been more unique, or even adding more details to bring the picture all together harmoniously.

Book Carving Creations: The Road to Oz...All that Glitters IS Gold!

     For this project, we were required to create a book carving that related to a theme.  The theme I chose was simplicity.  I started by researching and brainstorming some ideas that would look nice carved out.  I thought about doing scenes from different popular Disney princess stories, and that sort of left me with a silhouette idea.  I found a reference picture based off of The Wizard of Oz, and I used interesting shapes from that, such as the two types of vines in my sketches.  I knew that I wanted to do a yellow brick road, I just needed the Emerald City for it to lead to.  Well, I didn't know how to draw that or how good it would look carved.  But one day, I was in the band room and I saw an award (it was probably from a Disney World competition) that had a simple illustration of a castle. I took a picture of that and created a similar castle for my book.  As I worked on my thumbnails, I switched around the compositions and finally ended up with a final drawing for the book.  I created a clear idea what I would do, coloring each different layer and deciding on the thicknesses so I would know what to do after I finished each one.  Since the castle and idea was simple, I felt I needed something complicated to throw into the design.  Seeing that curved lines and small spaces are more of a challenge to carve with an x-acto knife, I knew that the vines would take time and precision.  Once I started carving, I found out that it was, indeed, very difficult to carve the small spaces.  The thing that annoyed me the most was that the knife would only carve through one to two pages at a time, leaving only a vague outline for the next pages.  Therefore I was against making layers that were more than six or seven pages thick because it took so much time to proceed.  I ended up making a bunch of mistakes with the cutting, but I either ripped the pages out or taped them back together!  By the time I got to the more simpler background it was easier to do thicker layers, but the whole process was very time consuming.  A risk I took was doing those vines because they were so small and thin, always ripping.  They also became a challenge when I was adding color.  I started with colored pencil, and I couldn't get the vines dark enough because I didn't have anything to press down against.  After I used colored pencils, I didn't like the look so I tried water color.  That also did not seem dark enough to get the right feel across so I used acrylics.  After I started, I had too much green in it so I painted the castle pink to separate it from the other cool colors.  I then added glitter to make a yellow brick road and glitter paint for highlights and extra SPARKLES!!!  Overall, I am happy with my final product.  To improve it, I would do a better coloring job and I would have incorporated the theme on the cover.  Unfortunately I was pressed for time but I am happy that the time was well spent!

Mixed Media Mash-up

     For this project, we were create an art piece using different materials and amusement as the theme.  I chose to do a swing in my picture because I love swings and they're very amusing and fun for kids.  I used magazine paper, water color, pen, printed pictures of flowers, paperclips, oil pastels, and painted paper in my piece.  I connected the pieces all together by using the pastels to sort of mesh the grass and flowers, and water color on the magazine paper to blend it together a little bit more.  The visual journaling we did was cool, but I didn't use that style in my art.  I enjoyed using the different colors of tissue paper and then made my product very colorful as well.  I had some trouble coming up with ideas that I could execute well, but I kept trying to make the piece look alright.  I think it was cool because I painted the paperclips on white paper, and when I lifted them up there was black paint strokes on it and I decided to use it.  This shows that you're never done with art and new ideas can show up unexpectedly.  This was not my favorite project, and next time I'd like to come up with some more expanded ideas.

Just Noodling Around: Non-traditional Portraits

       For this project, I chose a picture of my brother. He makes incredibly silly faces, so I knew that one of his signature expressions would be fun to work on. I created a list of materials that I thought would work for this project. My favorites were sequins, pony beads, and colored noodles. I chose the noodles because they were unique and cost effective. I also knew I needed something I could work with and break for curves and small places. My choice made my project look like a bunch of random noodles up close but a person from far away. This goes along with why it's non traditional. Some risks were coloring the noodles (I didn't know how), and I wasn't sure if it would come together as one piece in the end.  My choices were very good when it came to the colors because they went well together. I also did a nice job of fitting the noodles together and filling most of the empty spaces (some were left as highlights).  Overall this was a fun and time consuming project, and now Mrs. Rossi will be buying many new glue sticks!