Grant Smith
Rossi
Visual Arts II
12 January 2014

Final Blog

 This was by far my favorite unit of this semester. I enjoyed it because I was able to create art in a non-traditional way that allowed me to create a picture that fit so well together out of so many dissimilar things. By doing so the end product that I achieved in both my final and my practice I was extremely pleased with. Although I wish I had done some things differently; first of all I would have used my practice as a final, I was able to find and piece together numerous items that's end piece I enjoyed more, by the time we got to the final piece most of the magazines that I wanted to use from had been torn to shreds and very scarce of anything I found fitting to my piece. Second of all I would have practiced gluing before I pieced it all together, without this prior practice the glue stands out and doesn't work together as smooth and precisely as it does on the final project. I was extremely pleased, however, with the final work of both the practice and the final. The piecing together of these various different snip-its of magazine to create one very uniform smooth end product was a interesting and new way of art that I had yet to have experienced. This project in my mind is an overall success and I look forward to revisiting it in the future on my own time.

Grant Smith
Rossi
Visual Arts II
2 December 2014



I did not enjoy doing this peppermint, making the values was extremely difficult when using this medium. I found it difficult to give that smooth curving look that a peppermint has let alone be able to express the wrapper in with it. I did however enjoy using this medium I liked the way that the color popped and had a glowing effect on the black paper. I think there are a lot of cool ideas that can be expressed through this medium. I was not entirely happy with my final on this project because I was unable to achieve the realistic look of a peppermint. I do however hope to use this medium again in the future because I enjoy the look of this medium on that background.






I enjoyed this project more than the last because using this medium I was better able to capture the shape and wrapping of the Jolly Rancher. The way you were able to draw the lines and over lap them with other colors really helped in the creation of a more realistic Jolly Rancher, it also aided in being able to show a clear wrapper on the candy which is no easy feat when drawing. However, this medium was not my favorite but it was a good starter going into the colored pencils. I believe I captured the same look found in the Jolly Rancher in my artwork. If I had elected to re-do this picture I would have smoothed out the lines accordingly and not been so heavy handed when laying the initial colors down.






This was by far my favorite medium and final product of the three. The colored pencil made attention to detail a lot easier than the thicker mediums that were used in the previous projects. I liked how I was able to capture the folding of the wrapper by how hard I used the pencil. Although this project is primarily white I was still able to capture all the twists and folds found in the wrapper without having to use very much shadow at all. I was very pleased with the final project of this medium, enough do that I chose to use color pencils in my final project for this unit. If I were to re do it I would apply more shadow and value to further express every crinkle and curl in the wrapper. I look forward to using this medium again.



I felt that my final project was good and unique. I chose my favorite of the three mediums which was a colored pencil, this is because I found layering and attention to detail easier. To create my picture I used a style of painting very famous where you just put dots and make a picture from it, only I used colored pencils. I chose to pursue this style because it was unlike any other drawing style in the class as well as the object I elected to draw my inspiration from was a needlepoint belt in which a picture is made up of numerous tiny dots. I first began on a white paper in which the yellow did not show up very well then moved my first final to black paper which proved to be to dark for the blues and in my attempt to lighten the dots up I furthter messed up the project. My true final was on a tan paper which made it easy for you to see the yellows and oranges and made the blues pop. If I could do it again I would create a system to keep myself organized so nothing is unpropirtional or slanted. I enjoyed this project and hope to complete works of art similar in the future.



Clay was a tricky task to complete and overall I wasn't as pleased as I had hoped to be upon completion of my project. The waffles were easy to make although they did not turn out as good as I had excpected in regards to depth of the grooves in the waffle. The plate is the part that really bugged me it didn't come out looking half as clean or crisp as I had wanted it to. Then when I painted over it I decided I did not like the way the color complemented the waffles, that it almost took away from the main focus point. The final product itself didn't look terribly impressive until the clear coat was added, this really created the illusion of a buttered down waffle. This was the key to my success in this project and I am glad that I elected to do the entire thing not just the plate. If I could do it again I would pay more attention to the groves in the waffle but over all I feel that the final product was a success.

Grant Smith

Rossi

Visual Arts II

27 October 2015

Artist Painting

I struggled slightly with this painting primarily because painting is not really my forte. I enjoyed doing the sky that was by far on of my most favorite parts, painting the actual surrounding stadium itself proved to be harder than I thought. Due to my inspiration picture being a panoramic it really put the perspective into a bunch of funny angles that without the actual football field present you wouldn't be able to tell what it was. This posed as a serious problem when painting as it made the perspective on the picture extremely difficult to draw out and even harder to paint. My artist was Vincent Van Gogh and I used his painting "Starry Night" for my inspiration to paint this picture of Alabama's crimson tide. I focused primarily on the sky of Van Gogh's painting which I incorporated into my painting with the long swooshes and the array of different colors that painted a unique path through the sky almost as if it were wind. I tried to capture this affect in the incorporation of yellow into my painting which began high, then swooped low, only to return back to high. I also noticed that much of the painting was drawn in a series of swooshes to make up one bigger picture. Using this realization I was able to draw the fans which make up the vast majority of the painting. I took the swooshes and made them small and used a variety of colors to wrap around the stadium and even on to small portions of the field. The figures you see on the field are band members which is why they are more organized and not drawn in a series of swoops and instead in stacked lines. I chose to represent them this way because they are the main focus point adjourned by the fans in the stadium so I felt that special attention to detail was needed to go towards the band to help distinguish the fans from the band. Overall I felt I could have improved on this project, I didn't feel as successful as I did after completing my perspective drawing but I feel that was more due to the difference in artistic styles. I was still relatively happy with the end product if I look at it from a distance without my glasses on and tilt my head a little. I feel I captured certain main focuses of my artists style while still being able to add my own unique and original style to the painting so in that aspect I do feel accomplished that I was able to take a grasp on my artists certain style and turn it into my own. 

Grant Smith

Rossi

Visual Arts II

27 October 2014

 Perspective

I enjoyed this project, perspective in some ways was easy and others was extremely hard. I personally found it a hundred times easier to do a picture in 16 point perspective than in 2 point perspective which is why I chose to do the project that I did. While I felt my project was simple it was also extremely repetitive and a lot of busy work to detail and draw all those building including unique tops to several of the building to add a little bit of creativity to the project. I was hesitant on even adding different rooftops to the picture in fear that the amount of perspective which was a key part in the originality of the drawing would also be my downfall if by adding the rooftops I would breach into the next realm of perspective and the roof would not match the building below it. Yet after I was finished adding one or two rooftops it made such an impact and such a huge difference in how the picture looked that I had to put it on as many as possible. The rooftops ended up making the picture and even though not all are the exact perspective as the building I was able to mask that by putting more and more rooftops on to strain the eyes from one or two small mistakes. Another huge difference that proved to make or break the picture was the use of retracing over the pencil in pen, this simple step made a world of difference as it left a sharp crisp look over all of the buildings and really made the picture pop. It also in a way added emphasis to the use of repetition in the picture such as the hundreds of windows that are incorporated throughout the faces and sides of the buildings. I was not able to produce a sketch copy of the painting as I could not re-do what I had already done in the time allotted to complete the picture because initially I was indecisive on how I was going to use my buildings in perspective whether it be like a hot air balloon supporting a house or the final product that you see today. Overall I am very pleased with the final product which goes into why I did not add the black to show the shadows of the buildings where they overlap each other because I did not believe I would be able to accomplish that in proper perspective and still have the same attractive looking finished product that I have today if I were to mess up in pen and over shadow or shadow the wrong side of the building. This project definitely taught me a lot that I didn't know prior to beginning the class and I am glad that we used this as our first project because I will be able to incorporate this into almost all of my upcoming projects that will give it a more intermediate look on my future projects rather than the 2-D look that was present in all my projects prior.

Photoshop- Pancake and Frog Tongue

I had a lot of trouble with this picture. It seemed like nothing was going my way through this even with the directions help. I believe it is safe to say I am not very good with computers considering I can barely figure out how to work this blogger let alone how to photo shop pictures to look real. I wasn't very happy with the final product mainly because mine did not look like everybody else. Usually when we do an art project we can do our own thing and no two people will have exactly the same picture, but in this we had everybody work on the same frog picture and pancake picture so I could really see how bad mine really were. Although my end result in my opinion was not very good I still enjoyed doing this project in the sense that I have always wondered how to photo shop something. I had a much easier time doing the pancake than I did the tongue frog, it might have been because I don't like pancakes and making one angry and disgusting didn't seem like to bad an idea. The frog tongue however was a little more tricky as it required more blending and a lot more specialized time working on blending, getting the right color in, and making it not seem so fake by adding the correct shadowing and other things. This made it more challenging than the pancake which was a more simple design. The pancake did give me a good warm up going into the harder more complex photoshop but because I was not very good at the photoshop the first go around I knew the second wouldn't be much better.

Print making

The project for me was very hard to make, and I believe my finished project reflected that. Although I was not disappointed in the way my project came out I was not satisfied either, I feel I could have done better but given my lack of experience the final product was not all that I had visioned in my head. I don't believe that it came out the worst thing I've ever done but I deffiently was not happy with it. My sketch lacked a creative background, although the idea of having  a sea turtle flying through the sky seemed like a good one in my head unfortunately I could not draw it the way I had seen it. Bottom line the background sucked but I didn't know what else to do that was creative and original, so I made the best of what I could using that idea. I made several errors during the carving stage and did not blend the textures very  well with the background and that made me mad so I probably cut a little to deep in some areas and that reflected on the final product. Although this was a good experience it was deffinetly not one of my favorite techniques, and even though I believe my next one will be better I do not hope to do another any time soon. 

Stencil Project

Ive had a little bit of prior experience regarding stencil projects but never to this degree, I did not chose a very good original color scheme and it made tracing my stencil's a lot harder than it should have been. I was confused at first on how i needed to draw and cut the stencils but when I was finished spray painting both stencils I believe i did it right. I feel that this was succesful despite the hard time sketching the stencils it came out fairly well. There are slight imperfections after I layered the stencil with the white spray paint. But I was very satisfied with my final product for the stencil.