Reflecting on the Four Hour Project

I feel very good about the project. I also really enjoyed doing this project and hope to finish it when I get the chance. This project was my favorite project from the entire term. During this project we were given 4 hours to showcase our best art skills and hand it in although I haven't finished I felt I did fairly well. The process went well and in the first the first day although I talked a lot I got a lot of work done I completed the outline and the first half of my portrait. Although on the following days since we didn't have as much time I only completed the sketch of the face the other face and wasn't able to shade or color but overall the process went well. I understood all of the concepts that we learned this year and I tried as much as possible to utilize those concepts and skills while doing the project.I think that you can better assess my learning by assigning more drawing projects and assignments which I think may happen this term.

The Book Project............. progress and planning

The story that I am telling is that a president of a country is being impeached for being caught squandering the countries money on stocks and the country ,like the U.S, is facing a recession. The people are greatly impacted by this recession and they are in a very miserable state. Then they elect a new president who promises to help them overcome this recession and he does. With this man as president they become one of the wealthiest countries in the world and the country is now as beautiful as ever and the people are overjoyed. So far the process is going fairly well but with the class time I now have I plan to catch up. The challenges that I've faced were taking plain pictures that I planned to keep the same and changing them so that they are now different using the principles of design. One thing that is going well is that I have one picture completed and I like it. What isn't working is that I don't have a lot done.

Drawing the Human Figure From the Inside Out

The goals for today's class drawings were to draw various classmates, while they were in all kinds of obscure positions that were difficult to draw. The ways that I achieved these goals were to start from the center of their body/ waist, like Ms. Roberts demonstrated, and work my way down by drawing the legs and feet. Then, I drew the top of the figure, stomach and head to complete and balanced the sketch out. Then after we figured out the porportions and the main scheme of the drawing then we added detail such as eyes, clothing and etc.Throughout this activity I didn't face any challenges other than the fact that we couldn't erase. The final product of my drawings were pretty good and I was very surprised because my portraits looked a lot like the people we were drawing. Next time I will try not to make many mistakes so that I will not need an eraser.

Shades of Gray

The goals for today's drawing were to make a charcoal drawing of light and dark objects using additive and reductive techniques. We used many different utensils such as black and white charcoal, pencils and erasers to help capture the light in the drawing and utilize 5 different shades of grey to make the drawing includung black and white. I think I did fairly well with this despite the fact that I was sick which slowed down my process and impacted my final product. Challanges I faced were capturing the different shades of grey and capturing the light in the drawing using an eraser. But I found ways to get through these obstacles; one of the ways that I got through these obstacles was I started paying close attention to the still life instead of drawing from what I thought it should look like. Overall I think that this was a tough but useful activity.

1. The painting above is called Nighthawks. The artist who created this painting is Edward Hopper. Edward Hopper is from Nyack, New York The painting "Nighthawks" was made in 1942 ; the medium that was used to make the work was oil on canvas.

2. My first impression of this work of art was that it had a very calm theme; the street was very lonely and it had it had a cafe that wasn't crowded. The first I thing that I noticed in the painting was the empty street; I thought that since it was so early in the day that the streets would be crowded.

3. Edward Hopper was an artist in New York was a prominent American realist painter and print maker but he was most popularly known for his oil paintings. Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Although, the diner in which he modeled "Nighthawks" after is gone. The painting reveals three customers lost in their own private thoughts. Although, unknowingly he was painting the loneliness of a large city.

4. Edward Hopper uses various principles of design. First, he used contrast to capture the light and whiteness in the diner with the other colors in the painting. The white really stands out from the other colors, since it is so bright and the other colors are dark and dull it draws all of the attention. Hopper also exibits asymmetrical balance in his painting; there is no balance because on one side there is a diner and on the other is just an empty street. His painting also lacks symmetry because if you cut a line through the middle, nothing would be even on either side.

Finding Images That are Balanced

SYMMETRICAL BALANCE:




ASYMMETRICAL BALANCE:



APPROXIMATELY SYMMETRICAL BALANCE:



RADIAL BALANCE:

Principles of Design

BALACE- is when the visual "weight" of an artwork feels equally distributed

Symmetry- same on the left same on the right

Approximately Symmetrical- almost symmetrical

Asymmetry- opposite of symmetry

Radial- going to be the same where ever the line is drawn

EMPHASIS- when one element in an artwork appears to be more important or attract the most
attention, we say it creates

Placement- where artist put stuff

Contrast- when something is very different to what is around it

Grouping- when artist takes a bunch of elements and put them together around the thing they want people to look at

RHYTHM & MOVEMENT- how the artist guides the viewer through a work of art

Repetition- same elements, altering elements, progression, repeating

Leading Lines- somewhere in the picture there is a line that leads us through

Implied Movement- shows literal movement, looks like moving, body position,

Optical Movement- repeat line or shape makes eye feel like motion is happening in the picture

Actual Movement- art that literally moves

PROPORTION- in art we are talking about the size relationships of the parts to one another or to the whole
Colors-
Shapes
Forms
When thinking about proportion think about how looks and think about a story or emotional component
We might use words like alot, a little, many, few, big, small, similar, etc.

UNITY- is the feeling that all the elements in work belong together

VARIETY- is achieved by introducing some differenced into the picture to increase visual interest