Chroma Chronicles

Haven't updated in a while. Been incredibly busy with assignments. I'm practically drowning in them. But I at least finished the final assignment of my Colour Exploration class. Wooo.
The idea was basically to use multiple media (which I did, with ink, pencil crayon, paint, mylar, graphite, marker, and collage) and at least two different narratives in one piece.

So I ruined a first edition, 1950's copy of a British book. I drew, painted, and glued in a number of different parades making their way through the pages. I didn't get it quite finished, but I did do a few dozen pages. Which, if you're drawing something new that many times, it takes longer than you'd think. I'm pretty happy with it.

First page, and the beginning of the parade.

A fashion runway, featuring the designs of the amazing Alexander McQueen

Chinese New Year

Funeral procession

Photos from a Korean parade I stumbled across in New York by accident.

Rococo and Notebook Doodles

So we had a mini assignment for Colour Exploration. We had to look at "bad" art. Of course I looked at kitschy art. Because it's awesome. Just a simple 8x10 sized drawing or painting to hand in. Nothing huge like my ridiculous drawing assignments.
One of my favourite things to draw is Rococo era costume and hair, so of course I stuck with that, making up some crazy powdered wig and lots of pink, with some frills, pearls, ribbon, and flowers thrown in. (All in pink of course.) I used copic markers for this one. Hadn't used them in a while. Because nothing I do for school lets you use markers. Which is quite sad really. They're such awesome things to work with.

Here she is, the stuck up Rococo aristocrat. I'm actually super thrilled with how the hair came out. ... I'm sure the teacher will give me a 1.374 out of 2 or something. He tends to give the most random grades.

Also, out of boredom, I thought I'd post some notebook/sketchbook doodles. When you have a 2 hour lecture followed by 3 hours of waiting around for your tutorial to start, it's hard not to doodle.

African/Pacific Art History notes. Complete with teen!Kenny and teen!Craig from South Park. (Been watching too much of that lately... Mysterion!)

Stylized Shiina Ringo, a super talented pop singer. Two costumes from her Expo DVD, which was amazing. And some more Art History notes.

And from drawing, an attempt at the maiko sakkou hairstyle, from memory. So it's probably very incorrect. I tried. It was more fun to draw than blocks. (I swear, our drawing teacher thinks we're incompetent.)

A Little Better...

Well, my faith in my drawing has improved, as I have seen the mark I received for my texture piece I had been working on a little while ago. A-. First A of university. Go me. Which averages out my C-. So my drawing grade, like everything else, is just that. Average. Better than below average I suppose.
At least it's not another C.

As for the critique on my rainbow cityscape piece. Someone actually asked how much to buy it. Wow. Quite the compliment. I now must think of prices. It's 3.5x3.5 feet on vinyl. I don't know. I really don't know prices. The print was done for free, and really should be free, as it was not the size nor the material I asked for. Of course, if I am going to sell it, I would like at least what I would have paid for it, plus maybe an extra 50 or so for the hours and hours spent in photoshop putting this massive thing together. Because I would like a copy of it for myself, and would need to pay for the second print. But like I said, I don't really know.

I hate pricing work. I never know what people really want to pay for it. And generally, people don't really want to pay that much.

Stress.

City Scape Rainbow

Finally finished Colour Exploration project number two. Where we had to take the colour scheme of one thing and apply it to something else. I pretty much looked to those cheap and tackily coloured plastic children's toys you can buy in the dollar store and applied that to a collage of my photos of buildings and architecture from New York, Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence, and Verona. Creating a jumble of a city in a rainbow of colours that looks bright and cheery and child friendly. Which is usually not how cities are portrayed in art. (Dark and dingy and grimy, with lots of greys and monochromatic colours.)

I'm quite pleased with how it came out. I wasn't sure it would look the way I wanted it to while I was working on it, but I'm much happier than I thought. Now it's on to the printers to get it printed on some fabric so it can be made into a canvas. Woo.

As well, Frittata has been graded, and, like the last Time Based Media piece, received a B-. So I'm still content. However, drawing has given me my first C-. Average for the school, yes, but not anywhere near acceptable for me. Maybe I'm not used to getting Cs in art. And I get that there are people here better than me and marking needs to be done on a bell curve, but I can't get a grade like that again. Now I feel like I need to get something in the As to average it out. Fingers crossed and hopefully we'll see something a little better than a C-. Ugh.

Oh, and another 72% to add to the mix. On the first essay I had written in three and a half years. Go me. I've never been good with essays.

Average?

It seems like I'll be sticking somewhere in the 70s while at school. I've received marks from 70 - 75% so far. Nothing above. Nothing below. A little strange, but consistency is nice I suppose. Though something in the 80s or, God willing, the 90s would make me a little happier.

I'm told it's because teachers want to push us to create bigger and better things. So, what am I doing? Creating a giant photo collage of a chaotic and tackily coloured city scape. It'll be 36x36. Which may not sound overly huge, but is quite big for me, as I like and tend to work small.

That is what I am currently working on. I've chosen all my photographs of buildings from around the world. (Mostly NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and Florence. And a few other places as well.) And now I am photoshopping each and everyone to look different; different colour schemes and whatnot. All highly saturated and very bright. Planning to get this printed on fabric which I will stretch over a canvas. Hopefully it'll turn out alright. We'll see...