Final Project

For my final project, I wanted to do something less meaningful and more lighthearted. Instead of focusing on modern day issues, I wanted to work on storytelling. While looking for a haiku that inspired me, I found this one;
| ground squirrel
| balancing it's tomato
| on the garden fence
by Don Eulert.
I decided to take it further and create a 6 panel comic for my 6 drawings to tell the story of the squirrel and his cherry tomatoes.

Project 1

Project 2

Project 3

For this series of drawings, I wanted to focus on the obsessiveness of capturing what we see. As artists, we obsess over recreating exactly what we see right onto our canvas. This, however, leads to overworking and overseeing what we are studying and ending up with something that may not be entirely realistic but is still meant to be that object. Each of my drawings involves plants and wildlife from different scenes and angles, but the constant attempt to capture them from these different viewpoints almost leaves the imagery uncertain and left up to the viewer's creativity.

Project 4 Part 3

For the final part of project four, I focused on doing simple gestural lines while still attempting to show the emotion of each person. After taking the line work to the computer to recreate it, I decided against adding any color to each portrait and instead kept them in black and white. I think this helps cause a sense of mysteriousness and lack of knowledge for each subject. Viewers are forced to guess who the person might be, what they might actually look like, what different colors they show, etc.

Project 4 Part 2

For this series, I used plants found in my garden to show the feeling of each of the phrases. I used fast, heavy strokes for the brittle feelings and wanted all the messy lines to be visible. For a softer painting on the second one, I used pastel, washed out colors in a very smooth fashion. For the creepy painting, I wanted to put emphasis on darkness combined with the color red, a color scheme typically used to instill fear. The last painting, the dramatic one, I used vibrant hues with a black overlay, using no washed out colors and letting the vibrancy take over. Each of the edits applied to the paintings is intended to bring the feeling further.

Project 4

In my portrait series, I wanted to show how our path in life becomes more unclear and possibly even dark as we grow up. We start as children with a simple mind and see everything as an exciting new opportunity. Once we get near the teenage years, we start to learn so much that we are not longer sure what our purpose is or what we want to do in the upcoming years. It's when time starts to move by too fast and we feel there isn't enough time to figure everything out. As we get even older, towards adulthood, we realize how much there truly is in the world and how many choices and responsibilities we are faced with.
In my child portrait, I used dark marks to show how things are more clear. As I made the next two, I started using smaller marks that were farther apart to show how life can become more and more unclear. The computer editing on each picture helps show how things can become more and more cloudy and uncertain.