Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Great Doodle Assignment

I hate this project. With a passion, I hate it. And that's not fair because it wasn't the assignment's fault as much as the fact that it was horribly time consuming and I had a lot of homework to do. I still don't like it though. I don't get the point of it. I  don't really think it looks cool and it wasn't very enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, it was easy. But that was the problem, it was too easy. It was mind-numbing. Everything worked about this project. Nothing went wrong. It wasn't a challenge. But I'm being negative. When I was going  over it in fine tip marker, I decided it was quicker to do the big parts in Sharpie and didn't hurt the project but it still used a lot of ink. If I was ever forced to do this again, I would skip doing it in pencil and go right to the fine tip since I didn't make many mistakes the first time. The hardest part was actually going over it again because there was a lot of tiny detail to get right. On the bright side, I learned a few new doodle styles to do in History class!

Clay

Clay is very messy and gets everywhere. However, it is a lot of fun. At first I really didn't like it because I had never done it before but after a while I enjoyed it a lot. I didn't like my mug before I painted it because it looked like something that any five year old could do and I had no idea what I would do with it when I got home. Once I painted it, though, I liked the scene and the penguins and if I'm lucky, my mom will at least use it as winter decor. I had similar feelings on my giraffe-llama. I like how they both turned out though. It took a while to get used to the clay and how to use it but once you learned the methods, it became fun. If I could have a do-over, I would take more time to shape my mug. Smoothing everything out was my favorite part. While the mug was a bit easy, the giraffe-llama was not. I had no idea what to make and I couldn't make any of my ideas. What's the use for it anyway? Finally, I sculpted out an odd looking cross between African Safari and Argentina. Once I painted it, it looked a lot better. The biggest challenge in this project was just letting go of what you had previously learned and giving in to a whole new way of art. Once I did that, it became fun. Besides learning that, I think I learned how to be a bit more creative and confident through these projects. I wish we could do clay all year.

Color Wheel

I was really happy about how this turned out. I was nervous going into it because I wasn't sure if I could do it. In the end, I was really happy with how the colors ended up blending but it took a lot of trial and error to get them right. I actually ended up really liking making the colors and painting. I found that it worked best to get a very tiny amount of my color and a lot of white. I don't think I would change anything about this but given the chance to do it again, I think I could make it better because I've had practice mixing the colors. The hardest part was getting all of the colors to get lighter in the same intervals. So much white paint! It was really neat to learn how to properly use the paintbrush and mix the colors but the coolest thing was that, before this, I really didn't think I liked to paint.

Two-Point Perspective City



I really did not like this assignment. Granted, I made it about a million times more difficult, but still. I just don't care to have enough imagination to design a city. The most successful part of this piece, unfortunately, is not able to be seen. That's because the story behind it is the part that I like best. It's my version of what would happen if the Earth was so polluted that we could no longer be outside. The whole world lives in giant buildings connected by tunnels. Anyway . . . It was not a good idea on my part to make so many horizontal lines. Because it was a two-point perspective  it took forever and a few days. If I were to have to re-do this project, I would scrap most of the horizontal lines. They were not the hardest thing to do, however. The hardest part was determining which point to draw the the lines back to. I wan't very good at determining this so some of the tunnels and building don't look quite right. This was kind of cool to do because I like that there is a set way to do two-point perspective. It's less creative than other pieces. Somehow, though, Mr. Puffpaff found a way to put in just enough creativity that it was hard. I really learned how much I don't like that.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Hallway Drawing


This was actually a very fun project once I had an idea. I wanted it to be a bit subdued but still fun. I missed the mark a bit on the whole subdued thing. I would have been much happier with this if I hadn't made the floor so colorful. I attempted to mute the color a little by shading it with black but it didn't have much effect. What I truly needed for the foor was a wheat-like color. Live and learn, I suppose. My favorite part of this piece is the right wall. I had a lot of fun blending the colors even though parts of it ended up being a little cat-pukey. If I could change parts of this I would, as previously stated, change the floors. However, I would also tone down the bench and do more with the trophy case but I didn't have the time for that. The hardest part to this was getting the proportions right, especially with the doors. I wanted them to look uniform but sometimes they would turn out to wide or narrow. The hall divider was also fairly difficult. During this, I just really learned how to get a hand for figuring out proportions. There was no hard and fast method but eventually, you just develope an eye for what looks right (I'm not, however, saying that I have yet attained this!).

Two Point Perspective Name

I am very happy with how this piece turned out but it was a bit complicated. I really like the finished project but I was concerned more than a few times. Since my name is so long, I thought it looked too busy to show the end of every letter. Instead, I choose letters selectively like the "r" in "Munderloh". I also chose a less chaotic color scheme to make the letters easier to read. I wasn't nearly as precise with this drawing as I was with my One Point Perspective Name. I roughly drew out the spaces for the individual letter but I didn't do much measuring from there. If I ever had to re-do this, I would find a way to make more space between the "y" in "Mallory" and the "m" in "Munderloh". They got kind of squished in the end. This actually wasn't as hard as I had first predicted. The hardest part would have to be making space for "Munderloh" but even that wasn't too complicated. I had completely forgotten about two-point perspective before this. I hadn't previously learned about how to take lines back to the vanishing point, and that truly made all of the difference.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

This was a project? Who would have guessed? It wasn't very hard, just time consuming. This was especially so since I am a perfectionist and had to measure out each letter to make sure that they were straight and symmetrical. I like how this turned out very much. This is pretty much exactly how I pictured it in my head. It worked very well to measure everything. The only problem came when I had to draw the yellow part. I wasn't always sure where each part should end so that it would seem as if it matched up with the other parts. If I re-did this project I wouldn't spend quite as long drawing the letters since they probably didn't need to be that presice. The hardest part of this project was drawing the "m's". There were just so many lines to them! I'm still not 100% pleased with them. Overall, I learned a new technique! The vanishing point was very fun to work with and not something that I would have thought to use otherwise.