Our first BIG assignment. I was quite happy with how this piece turned out, and looking back on it months later I am still pretty pleased with it. I do think that I have grown a bit as an artist since drawing this, and if I was given another assignment just like it I do think that I would be more confident in what I could  do.

All of my friends asked me why I was drawing a knee cap. I told them because I wanted to. They never have to know its fruit, right?

So our first critiqued items were faces. For one, I had never even drawn a face before. Add to it that we had to draw them completely 'blind'... well I was not too fond of the idea.
Because it was our first assignment I felt a bit nervous for everyone to look at the finished piece, nor did I really understand what 'add five values' could possibly mean. Since then I've gotten over people looking at my work, and looking back at these two drawings I can see the humor in them and the process in which they were made.

The first is an image of Kelly, and the second Riley. My attempt to add 'five values' of shading to Kelly's face didn't really work out, so I re-did the assignment with Riley's face.
I think I finally got the right idea.

Since cartoon shaped hearts are overly cliche and not quite deep, I have found a new idea. I really want to keep going with the whole idea of 'gold' not really being gold, or not being really what most people perceive it to be.

My proverb is:
"All that glitters is not gold"

It came to my from a J.R.R. Tolkien poem.

     All that is gold does not glitter,
     Not all those who wander are lost;
    The old that is strong does not wither,
    Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
    From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
    A light from the shadows shall spring;
    Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
   The crownless again shall be king

The poem takes a new spin and opposite spin on the old proverb, but I still think the two strongly relate. Hopefully I can manage to connect my thoughts. There are quite a lot of them floating around in my head right now.

My main medium will be plastic. I hope it works.

     So we had to make body parts. Out of cardboard. Cardboard and hot glue. I should have figured it would be something complicated when he told us to pick a body part, study it, and bring in pictures.
     I like brains though. They're pretty nasty looking, but what goes on inside of them is absolutely fantastic. The project could have been anything really. It could have been interpretative or something- so why not choose the brain?
     The first sketches were fun to do. I've never tried to draw a brain before. All those little twists and tubes are crazy. For the time limit's sake I kept it simple.

     I did the sketches before I realized I was only going to try the cerebellum. After I did decide to 'keep it simple' I went back and darkened the area and added more detail. Lots of different ideas went running through my head on how I was going to make it happen.
     Sadly, I threw the model away and forgot to take a picture. What I had done was shred the large, white sheets of paper into hundred of tiny strips and made the basic shape by gluing them together a strand at a time. The paper was much easier to work with, and I actually got a shape I thought represented the cerebellum.
      Then came the cardboard. I tried dozens of different ways of putting the piece together, some of which involved ONLY glue. I must have ripped about ten sculptures apart and glued them back together in a completely different way each time. This is what I came up with in the end. I ran out of cardboard and glue quite a few times, and I really wish I could have stuck with an idea so I could have spent more time making it look its best.
     The piece is very sturdy and completely hollow inside. I used oil pastels to color the base of the cardboard, as well as bits of the glue I had used for texture. Then I used a light pink spray paint to give the piece more coloring all around, and dusted it off with a purple shade of spray paint. This is what I got.

     Hopefully our next sculpting project will involve more flexible and mold-able materials :)

Ok. I finally figured out how to make this a comment...able site. Hopefully I will be able to figure out how to put comments directly by the pictures or something soon. For now- this will work I hope! More of my art will be up as soon as I edit them.