Accordion Book

My word for the composition I used was rough. I felt pretty good about the inside of my accordion book. My favorite one was the red and blue one. I played with the paper on that one and twisted it and folded it. For the plain newspaper one I pasted paper all over it and then created texture on the squares by folding and creating flaps over and over. The third one is kind of girly themed and I used all articles and such from victoria's secret and jc penny catalogue. The fourth one feels slightly masculine to me. I think the colors like green and the grey tones create this feeling.

For the outside of the accordion book I feel like I might not have pushed it as far as I could have and maybe even I picked the least interesting of the two 3D pieces. I'm probably going to revisit the pieces and push them further.

Crying baby rant

In my rant type thingy I wanted to address a problem that we've all run into while shopping. I may seem kind of bitchy about it and maybe less annoyed than I actually am with it, but here it is...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa93zB9XFJU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_X9o8BkJks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz9kchZw9lA

Second Line Assignment

I picked five drawings for the second line assignment.

layered drawing Song: Drifting By Enya

Second layered drawing Song: Opening theme to FFX2

Drawn to Bad Romance

Drawn to Viva La Vida

Drawn to Burn it to the Ground

I let my ipod play on random when I was drawing these pictures. I really enjoyed this line assignment. I found it more enjoyable to draw lines when I was listening to music rather than just drawing them. Sure the assignment took a little longer, but it didn't seem like it because I was just kind of jamming to the music and not paying attention to the lines and concentrating on drawing.

First Line Assignment

A thought

My Name

Folded Page

200 Lines with both hands

Attacking the page

crumpled page

100 lines

When I was making Lines at first I didn't really enjoy it. I found that the 100 lines felt boring to me, but once I started using both of my hands for the 200 line drawing. When I folded the pages and crumpled them I started to enjoy seeing the patterns that the charcoal would make. I used charcoal, soft, and chalk pastels. After taking a short break I wrote my name over and over with my eyes closed.  After a while I couldn't even tell if I was writing my name anymore. When I looked at it I couldn't read most of it.

Autobiographical Map listing Progress.

For my autobiographical map I'm planning on making it a 3D project that is a collage. I chose this because I struggle so much with collage and I'm trying to force myself to get better at it and actually enjoy it. I plan on making four to five hollow boxes that have one side open. On the outside I was going to paste maps of the places I have lived. Each box will have a pin point of the address of the house I was living in at the time. On the inside of the box it will have memories written down and some pictures of people and things that had happened at the time. Most will end up being dance pictures and pictures of the places I went to school and lived. Each box will be connected by some stair steps and maybe even be able to fold like an accordion. On each stair case between the boxes will be a listing of the school I attended at the time and what grades I attended them from. I started a long list and it's just getting longer.....

Maybe list some friends and random memories I have of them. Churches and things of that sort. I hope it turns out map like...

Modular Maddness In Progress and Finished

collecting bottles (117 bottles roughly)

washing caps

washing caps (collected over 1000)

The process of collecting and washing the caps and bottles was the most stressful because I had to order the caps off of ebay and then hope that they showed up on time. I also had to buy a ton of packs of Snapple and some how figure out what to do with all of the tea. I gave some to the class and drank a whole lot myself, but at the end I just couldn't force myself to drink it anymore.

I epoxied the base of the piece. It's made entirely out of Snapple caps. One note would be that epoxy smells really bad and either needs to be used outdoors or in an extremely well ventilated space. Also epoxy tends to feel greasy when it's "dried". After the base was finished I stacked bottles in columns. Between the columns I put four caps in different patterns. Also between some of the bottles I hung a bottle that didn't have any support. It ended up taller than intended.

Modular Madness Self Critique

The materials I used for my modular madness project were Snapple bottles and caps. The form ended up looking like some kind of chapel or shower type thing. I don't think the same meaning of the piece could have been achieved with anything else because I wanted to emphasis the facts on the caps and use them to draw people into it. I think the fact that each cap had a scientific fact on it yet the end product looked like a chapel was interesting. The only difficulty with the materials was the fact that bottles don't want to be anything but bottles and I had to work around that. Also the fact that the bottles were made of glass presented a problem because I was afraid I or someone else was going to knock over the piece and destroy it, so I worried about it when I was and wasn't at the WASH building.

I feel like the project was ambitious because of the frailty of the objects. Also the height of the piece was a little ambitious i felt because it was taller than me by just a little bit and it turned out taller than I had originally planned. My original idea was the build the piece purely out of Snapple caps, but I decided that they wouldn't be stable enough and wouldn't meet the height requirement I had set for myself. The initial piece wasn't more ambitious because the size would have been smaller and less fragile also I don't think it would have achieved the same meaning.

I had originally started putting the piece together with epoxy, but if i had used it on the bottles I would have had to move the piece in and out of the building. This wouldn't have been wise, so I decided to use hot glue. I feel that the glue wasn't exactly noticeable due to its transparency and it didn't really detract from the piece. I had a few places where the bottles didn't line up right, so I had to improvise. I didn't discover a better way to glue them together until the very end of the project.

I feel like the dominant formal elements in the piece are line, point, shape, and space because each column created a line that came to a point at the end. The shape was smooth all around yet it seemed kind of geometric. The bottles created negative space. The dominating principles were repetition, balance, and continuance.

The piece is chapel like in form and it almost seems like a place of meditation. This is kind of amplified because the "facts of life" kind of surround you if you were to sit in the space. I put it where it was because I wanted it to be viewed from all sides. It  could have been moved over slightly. The piece may be transparent, but it ignored the pieces around it because your eye is so focused on the little facts and the Snapple colors and such. Perhaps I could have left some of the bottles filled, but that might have created weight issues or even worse problems if some one had knocked it over.

Line pictures

many lines from shower tiles

door frame

corner of counter

lamp

cell phone (for my story)

power cord

Here are my line pictures. I found lines in quite a few places around my apartment such as on the floor, in my door, on the wall, and on my lamp. The cell phone creating a line is for my story, but I feel that it's too personal to share on my blog at this time. It's interesting how you can find lines and things of that sort in everyday life. I don't think I would have noticed them before this assignment.

Human Dot Critique

 We gave ourselves a three on craft because not all of the pictures were the same size, type, or style of picture. We also felt that we could have used white paper behind the hands.

We gave ourselves a four for use of white or negative space because the white was the same, but the dots weren't. The different dots changed the white space and made it gray.

We gave ourselves a four for dots because they were good because of the use of different textures on them, but they weren't the same.

We gave ourselves a five for the human element because we minimalized it by just using the hands, but the use of the hands as the background made the human element play a major role because it was the base.

We gave ourselves a five for theme because our theme was texture and we achieved this by using different materials for dots such as pom poms, marbles, and styrofoam balls. Also we played with the texture of our hand and the way the paint formed on the cracks and even cracked on the hands making the human element more present.

We gave ourselves a four for the group process because we executed our project well and quickly. We were efficient and knew exactly what we wanted to do, so this made it easier to work. Also we all worked well together and had a few laughs in the process. We actually had to touch hands, so that kind of made us get along better. Absence of group members is why we bumped our rating down to four.

Dots with a dash of human

Today in 2D we did our dot compositions with the human element introduced. For our backgrounds we used white and black acrylic paint and for the human element we used our hands.

Continuance

 

 

 

 

 

Proximity

 

 

 

 

 

 

The compositions I chose to recreate was my proximity and continuance pieces. We created the black dots using Styrofoam, cotton balls, and marbles painted black. As a group I think we enjoyed painting our hands a lot maybe a little bit too much. Ours was created and finished rather quickly and efficiently.