My final! finally! sorry its so late, I emailed Akanit about it already. Family emergency stuff.

Sorry nonetheless.

This was difficult. And i wanted to paint over it like in the other pictures i did in my other works.

I composited many of the images together, There is one im really not happy with and thats the storm trooper on the sand. it looks rushed and its irritating me. but im done with it. So done. ha

Some of the images are just straigh shots but those are mainly the storm trooper talking and the one in front of the house. 🙂

I liked the idea of doing a graphic novel and i feel like it what successful but wish i had more time to do a cover page or something like that.

I created a series of photos that I took myself. I transformed them using the technique we learned in lessons 7 LowPoly Portrait. I think some of the photos might have worked better than others. I had a lot of fun with this however, I realized that it is much more time consuming then I had originally thought it would be. I took more time on the smaller details within the bear, fox and flower photos. I think that when I took more time to do more detailed areas it made the photo look better in the LowPoly transformation. By far the most difficult photo to transform was the fireweed photo. There was so much more detail that I wanted to show through the transformation that it took the longest. I am very happy with the finished product that came out of the fireweed photo. Overall I am happy with what I created and look forward to do more detailed photos in the future.  

Tania Winston. Memorial. Acrylic on Paper. 18×22

For my final project, I decided to do a little something for my husband and create a memorial. I wanted to utilize the expressionist method, because I don’t think I did a very good job of it in the last assignment. I wanted the blood to be bright and stark against the green, so it would stand out and create a very strong emotion of not only violence and anger but of passion. The idea behind the painting was to memorialize the brothers  my husband  lost, and signify them with the unit patches.

When I first did the sketch, I was unsure of what to do with the flag. I didn’t want it to drape on the ground, so I put it up between the boots, where the rifle would be located in the fallen soldier memorial. The blood was the hardest because I wanted to make sure it looked like blood and not a red stain on the ground. I tried to incorporate different shades by using the pure red and then mixing in some black.  I didn’t blend them in very well at first, but I went over it a few times and finally I visualize the blood. I thought the boots would be difficult, but I am very happy how they came out. I mixed the yellow ochre color with the white to lighten up the shape. I then added just a miniscule amount of burnt sienna to it to darken it up a little. I used that to outline and provide some shading. I then used the original burnt sienna to do the lace holders, and then lightened it up for the laces.

I placed a tree in the background to show distance and also to fill in the empty space on the left. Overall, I am pretty happy with this painting.

This came from a story that I listened to on the youtube channel MrCreepypasta. The story revolved around a man who is stalking in a woman in attempts to kill her because of his hate of woman rejecting him. We spend a good part of the story building up this killer and making him out to be a seriously dangerous fiend. He spends weeks stalking this women learning her every habit so he can catch her at the exact moment. He plans to off her when she is taking a shower since it is one of the few times in the day where she will have no help available to her. We are with him when he breaks in and is about to get his kill. However when he arrives it is all turned on his head when he discovers that something is wrong. Someone else has already killed her and this is when the hunter becomes the hunted. One of the funnest things about this story is that it is from the lore of Creepypastas. Creepypastas are scary stories on the internet that are posted to creepypasta.com, from the S.C.P.  foundation  or have been narrated by on of the Creepypasta narrators  on youtube. The reason I bring this up is the creature that comes to kill the man is a long loved and iconic character named Jeff the killer and it is fun to see him used in a way that is actually fairly intimidating (trust me when I say he was not originally the most well written character.)

This picture was originally a sketch which I scanned into photoshop. I have been working hard to get better with photoshop since I didn’t start out that good. I have only been working with digital medium for two years and I am very happy to see that my artwork has gotten much better. I have learned many things about shadows and making under-layers. I tried to employ all my knowledge of photoshop into this picture and I am decently please with the results.

I made this  picture to show the reveal of the story. I tried to capture it at an odd angle in the hopes that this would disturb the viewer and help the get a sense of the horror and confusion that the serial killer is feeling as he realizes he is no longer in control of the situation.  The bathrooms pastel color pallet helps throw off the atmosphere  to help show how wrong the inter situation is.

This picture (other than being from a Creepypasta I really like) does have quite a bit of meaning to me personally. It is a tribute to every other piece of art I have done. You see when I am doing art I really don’t like to watch things that will distract and listening to music really doesn’t keep my attention for this sort of thing. I need some form of words in the background and 9 times out of 10 I’m going to be listening to a horror story. It’s just how I roll, it really helps me focus in on what I’m doing. I have a very deep love of horror stories and they have really helped me along in life from distracting me at the dentists office to doing artwork. I’m hoping this picture captured me love of the genre.

My final project was super fun to do! I hope everyone else had fun since we had free reign on this one!

For my final project, I wanted to focus on color schemes a lot. Those lessons really intrigued me and kept me interested. My two favorites were the monochromatic schemes, and the color discord schemes.

So to start out, my biggest inspirations were the people I listen to the most while making art. Their names are Father John Misty and Lykke Li. Both of them are super ethereal but raw singers that use different elements of music to balance out the harsh with the soft. But the thing that really makes me love them is their irony in their music. Lykke Li sings very adult and mature songs with this almost childlike singing that is very haunting and beautiful, while Father John Misty makes fun of today’s society through ironic song structures (for his new album, the only electronic song is called “True Affection’ and is about NOT using electronic devices to speak to each other, but to speak in person).

When I first thought of irony, I automatically thought of color discord, just because I thought you could change something “beautiful’ into something hard to look at. I thought of nature. I thought if I made these natural things be hard to look at and artificial, it would create something really starkly different from the mainly monochromatic people above. I also threw in some skulls to make the color scheme–which is “twisted’ on something natural–balance out so that there is something deadly and obscure in the grouping.

Now for the singers, I wanted to created a pop-art feeling to them. So I created realistic under sketches for their bodies, but then make the coloring really dramatic. This was easy to do since I did this on my tablet. Also, in light of Father John Misty, I gave them crowns because where his name is so pretentious (which I love about him.) The dots on their faces was just a stylistic choice that I thought wrapped the piece as a whole.

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WOW! I can’t believe the semester is over! I really enjoyed having this class and I hope everyone did, too. At the beginning it felt very disconnected from the rest of you guys, but in the end I feel like we’re a tiny community of art students that post art for themed shows. I’m just rambling now ha ha. But I’ve really enjoyed seeing everyone’s art and you can really tell the personalities of everyone through the art. Sorry, I get super sentimental at times!

Have a good break everyone!

For my project I attempted to create a Mucha-like rendering of a pun I thought of a while ago.   The pun is based off the band, Pink Floyd, and the boxer, Floyd Mayweather.   Although I liked the idea a lot, I could not seem to create the image that was in my mind.   I always planned for the drawing to be monochromatic so the pun would be relevant, but I had a lot of issues creating an image I liked with the limited color range.   This is the end result of my struggle with Photoshop.

My original plan for tackling this piece was doing a drawing and scanning it into Photoshop to improve the drawing.   I chose to do a Mucha like drawing because I enjoy his line work and use of patterns.   I thought it would be good to challenge myself to do this since I usually stay away from decorative patterns because I enjoy rendering realistic objects.

After doing many sketches and coming up with a composition I liked, I began working on the drawing.   Since I am taking a few other studio classes, I have been doing a lot of drawings lately and been working in traditional mediums.   I think this is the reason that when I started doing this project, I decided to only use the computer.   I told myself it would be good to challenge myself with Photoshop since I plan on using it more after this class.   I normally use a program called SketchBook Pro that I prefer because it is simpler and more intuitive for me.   However, it doe not have enough feature or versatility to be helpful with photo manipulation.

I used a few different large images from the Internet to piece together a collage that resembled the sketch I did earlier.  I wanted to enlarge the images to create a composition closer to my original sketch but I was afraid that the image would become pixelated.  I had to use the magic wand tool a lot to cut out certain things I did not want.   I used the rectangle tool to create a box for the letters and applied a lot of different filters to the image.

The thing I had the most trouble with was figuring out how to make Floyd Mayweather pink without just doing a drawing of him and scanning it in.   I spent hours on YouTube looking for tutorials on how to make a monochromatic photo but all of them were for gray scale images.   None of them showed colored photos and the ones that did, were not very good.   I ended up taking the image to Illustrator and using the tracing option to limit the colors of the original photo to about 10.   Then I began to mess around with the paint bucket and coloring in the image to make it pink.   This took forever and was not very rewarding because the image looked really harsh in comparison to Mucha’s work.   To mediate this, I messed around with filters.   I used the skills we learned from Lesson 9.   I still was not happy with the harsh changes in color so I went back to the original photo of Mayweather, manipulated it to be more blurred, changed the hue to make it pink, and layered that over my image at a low opacity to soften the piece.   Although it helped, I wish I could have created something that was closer to Mucha’s style.   I will probably stick to traditional methods until I get more comfortable with Photoshop.

As far as the colors go, I wish it were not vital for the pun for me to change the color pallet.   I would have liked to use a larger range of colors so I could draw more attention to Mayweather.   Right now, I feel like the decorative pattern and similar colors push him out of focus.  A funny thing I notice when I uploaded the image was that I accidently changed the background color to pink.  When I was working on the image the background looked like a really light shade of pink since there was so much pink around it.  However, I know that the color is white since on this post it blends into the screen.  I thought this was worth mentioning since it related to the color contrast exercise we did.  One good thing that came out of this drawing is that I learned a little more about Illustrator and also came up with another idea.   It is going to be ‘Monochrome’ Lewinsky.  Eventually I’ll grow up and stop liking puns so much but I don’t think it will be anytime soon.

For the final project I focused on organics with an abstra grunge look. I left the edges rough to keep a grunge and draw attention the the details that were a little better formed.

The idea behind it kept true, though I think that more highlights could’ve really made the pieces. I had to keep the acrylic fairly wet and work quickly, there is a good bit of layering in some of the pieces and the lighter bits still haven’t come through, perhaps it’s my lighting. I got soft lights…

For my final project, I wanted to continue to work on Van Gogh markings.   I used a photograph I had taken at Creamer’s Field during the fall as a guideline.   As I mentioned in my proposal, the photograph itself has a luminism feel to it and part of the challenge would be converting it to Van Gogh’s impressionist style.   I accomplished this through a focus on overall shapes and the way they flow versus trying to capture every detail.   I relied heavily on brushstrokes to convey depth, direction and texture.   For example, the brushstrokes in the water are a little longer and fluid than the grass.

My intention was to stick to a triadic color scheme of green, orange and purple and I think I was fairly successful, though the yellow and some blue is featured more than I had initially intended.   The bulk of the picture (maybe about 75%) was painted using solely pthalo blue, yellow and orange.   I was surprised at the versatility you could get from three colors by simply mixing in different ratios and overlapping layers of paint.   I was worried it would be mottled and hard to differentiate where one part of the painting ended and the other began.   It forced me to make bolder color choices, such as painting pure orange over the tops of the bushes where the sun would hit.   I don’t know that I would have tried this otherwise.   Previous to taking this class, I would’ve thought it wouldn’t work; the orange would be too loud and just look weird on it.   I’m really glad I tried it though because I’m thrilled with the way it turned out.   It really lends itself to that “golden hour” feel which may have been lost otherwise.

The markings themselves were tricky to figure out at first, but once I got the hang of blending (but not really blending) the short brushstrokes, it started to really come along.   The sky was a several night-long endeavor, as was the lake.   The background took a significant amount of time, too, but it was really from several attempts at reinterpreting the photo so it would be more conducive to the markings, without making everything mesh into one giant, unidentifiable thing.

Overall, I’m really happy with the outcome.   It has been a long, long time since I painted anything and with that being said, this is my first original painting.   I think the colors work well together and the brushstrokes are reminiscent of Van Gogh to me.

I chose to do pointillism for my final project because I felt that it went well the first time I tried and wanted to  try again, only this time using Photoshop. This course has helped me learn more about Photoshop and how to use it so I wanted to use it for the final assignment.

I feel like it would’ve taken longer if I were to have done acrylic because of all the wait for each layer of paint to dry. Using Photoshop definitely felt like a faster process  but there were a few difficulties. The hardest thing to do was drawing the flowers. At first it was hard to get them to look like flowers and not just a big glob. After I retraced a few steps I was able to get the look I wanted.

I decided to stick with my original drawing of cherry blossoms. It turned out similar but it also had some differences. I’m happy with the way the colors turned out and the overall outcome of the project. My favorite thing about this digital drawing is the way the background turned out, it really looks blurred, making the flowers seem closer and more focused.