Farewell to Summer

I took a break off from blogging for the majority of the summer for the sole reason that I was unable to finish any of my artistic endeavors.

I started many projects, but finished nothing. This is not to say that I was unproductive this summer--I kept myself incredibly busy and filled a journal with many sketches and ideas. I just had no motivation to do anything with my ideas. When it came down to assembling materials and mustering the technical skills to execute it, I was ready to move on to a new idea.

Now, as I look at starting into my third week of school, I have all of the motivation I could ever need to be creative, simply because I have no desire to do my calculus homework. I'm constantly struck by how creativity often comes to me in waves, and how inconvenient that can be at certain times.

But despite the fact that I have very few completed drawings or paintings from the summer to show, I have collected some other things to share.

First off, I took a lot of photographs this summer in both individual and stop-motion form. I've realized that I haven't really shared any photographs of things that aren't my artwork, and I would like to change that.

So, here are some of my favorite photographs that I took this summer.

Jewelry from a day trip to Santa Fe

Red jellyfish at the Birch Aquarium

A routine visitor to our backyard. 

Delicious dessert from our trip to California.

In addition to these pictures, I was able to complete a few videos as well, this time with some friends as my subject. This was so much fun to film, and my friends enjoyed having a movie made of them. You can watch it on my vimeo account here:
https://vimeo.com/46941463

I had a lovely summer, filled with a lot of great memories. I'm sad that it's over, but I am excited to finally be in my senior year of high school. There is a lot of promise for creative endeavors to occur in the upcoming year, and I am very excited to share them all!

Keep a lookout for new posts!

Updates and Experiments

I am going to try and post more regularly, I promise!

Lately, I have been working on many projects--all of which include new experiments in painting and animation.

First off is a short stop motion test that I did, trying out a style of paper animation. Although this video is only three seconds long, it took me about three days to film. I learned a lot in the process, and I discovered ways to make the filming piece easier, as well as make the final product a bit more fluid. I really like being able to design and create my own puppets for the animation, though I learned that they need to be bigger in size to make moving them easier.
I'm very excited to play around more with paper animations!
You can watch the very short video here:
https://vimeo.com/44347001

Another thing that I have been working on is playing around with mixed media in my artwork. I am finding more and more that I really enjoy incorporating other mediums in my paintings, this time combining white sharpies, colored pencils, and watercolors.

Here is a picture of it:

Additionally, I have been very interested in the prospect of painting hats and incorporating different mediums in embellishments in the hats. Along with the hats, I've been playing around with trying to draw children's faces, which has been very challenging for me. I've only done a few sketches thus far, but I'll keep you all posted if I actually go through with executing this idea.
Regardless, here is one of my favorite hat-related sketches (and attempt at a child's face) that I've done so far:

Now, to conclude this massive post about all things art-related in my life, I will show you an in-process picture of a painting that I'm working on. This is a painting that I've been spending a lot of time planning, and I hope that my pre-painting efforts will end up to be rewarding. I think that I'm going to post some in-process pictures of this piece, and attempt a sort of photo-journal about my process with it. 
Here is the first glimpse at this painting:

You could even leave me a comment about what you think it's going to be a painting of--I'd love to hear your predictions!

Oh Blogspot, How I've Missed You

I kind of fell off the face of the planet for a while.

Things got really crazy with school--ACT, AP tests, final projects, final exams, plus all of the end of year awards and festivities--and being creative stopped being a priority for me.

But here I am now, on summer vacation, enjoying a bit of free time to relax and catch my breath after a crazy school year. And what am I doing? Extensively cleaning my room and editing all of the old pieces of videos that I found on my camera, while also beginning to make a plan to execute all of my creative projects.

So, this video that I'm including on this post is one that I finished editing today, but was actually filmed two or three weeks ago as I prepared a fruit plate to contribute to a drama banquet for my school. Although they were not my best carved watermelons, they were still a lot of fun to make and deserved to be documented!

Vimeo link:
https://vimeo.com/43138514

An Aquarium Adventure

A few days ago, I dragged my lovely sister with me to the aquarium so I could make a stop motion video. Although neither of us really had time to go spend a Thursday afternoon at the aquarium, I think it served as a nice break and a chance to get in a little bit of relaxation before going home to study for some big tests. It's been a busy few weeks for me, but I'm hopeful that the fast approaching Spring Break will give me a chance to get control of everything and really sit down and focus on finishing some projects of mine.

I simply adore going to the aquarium. I think fish are beautiful creatures and I like to just sit and watch them. I find that there is something a little eerie about the aquarium, because it is so quiet and there's so much movement. The colors are so bright, and they all move in different speeds and patterns--it's silent chaos. To me, the experience of sitting and watching them swim in different directions is hypnotizing and incredibly peaceful.

Now, I will admit that this post is much more about the video I created than writing about the actual experience of going to the Aquarium. This video is compiled of 1,152 individual images, with each image being about 1/12 of a second.

So, here is the link to the video!
http://vimeo.com/37903027

Never Underestimate the Power of The Dork Side

For every six-week grading period at my school, my math teacher assigns us a project. These have included poems about the quadratic formula and secret messages decoded through simplifying equations. And for this grading period, we were assigned to make a game about logarithms with a partner.

Now, I am very fortunate that a good friend of mine from my Nerd Herd is in that class with me, and we got together to make this game. After much observation of our teacher for the past semester, we learned that she is quite the Star Wars fan. And in no way trying to appeal to her interests with the hopes that she'd appreciate our creativity, we decided we would make a Star Wars themed board game about logarithms.

This proved to be more ridiculous than we imagined.

We started with our cards. There are three types--the Yoda Asks cards, the Fortuitous Cards, and the Final Battle Cards. The Yoda Asks cards were where we addressed all of the math concepts, and the other two types of cards were to add an element of chance to the game to make it more engaging.

We then set off to create the directions for the game, which simply brought us to the conclusion that if our game wasn't about logarithms and exponents, it could actually be incredibly appealing. That is not to say that logarithms are not entertaining, but I think an entire game based around them is rather daunting.

We then were able to start on the fun stuff, like making our board and the character pieces. This is what everything ended up looking like:

These are the contents of the game, color coded and all!

Logarithms and Exponents in Space. This is the outside of our box.

The math pieces and directions, both infused with Star Wars trivia and quotes.

Our groovy Millennium Falcon game board.

And finally, our awesome character pieces. 

I had a lot of fun with this project, and I'm beginning to appreciate why my math teacher has us do these projects. They all require us to blend math concepts with art and writing. This process helps to strengthen our grasp on the math portion because one cannot successfully create a game about logarithms if one does not understand how logarithms work. 

And I'll try to remind myself of this when I come home complaining the next time she assigns one of these six-weeks projects.

The Sketchbook Project

Well, after almost four months of working on it, my sketchbook was mailed off to New York.

For anyone who doesn't know what The Sketchbook Project is, here is the website:
http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject2012
Basically, it's a project in which you are sent a Sketchbook with a theme and then you have to send it back to them completed by a certain date after which, all of the sketchbooks go into a collection that goes on tour, and eventually are added into permanent residence at the Brooklyn Art Library.

I signed up for this project and received my Sketchbook in the middle of October and began working on it immediately. After some problems with the paper that the sketchbook came with (it was very flimsy and deteriorated when I put watercolors on it), I decided to rebind my sketchbook with different types of paper that would allow for more variety in my book. Along with this came the idea to film the creation of the sketchbook and put together some artistic documentation of the process.

After months of working on this book, I finally completed it two days before it needed to be postmarked and sent off. I then began the endeavor of scanning the entire book so I could have a copy of it, which took an extraordinarily long time. Then, I allowed my family to look at the book and give me their opinions and feedback. I then packaged and addressed it, and my mother sent it off for me the next day.

My sketchbook was sent away this past Monday, and since I finished it so close to the deadline, not many people got to see it. So, I began editing the footage I had taken while drawing and painting and I have completed my video.

Also, on a side note, I am very dissatisfied with the quality of video that blogspot supplies, so I have decided to make a Vimeo account, which will include the other videos that I've posted on blogspot.

Anyways, here is the link to the video. The songs used are Walking the Dog by Fun., Daylight by Matt and Kim, and Your Hand In Mine by Explosions In The Sky.

http://vimeo.com/36175008

Parting with the sketchbook wasn't as difficult as I expected it to be. I had envisioned that I would fall in love with the art and writing in my book and not want to send it away. But in reality, although I am content with the way it turned out, I am happy to let it go. I realized that in working on it for such a long time, I had funneled a lot of my feelings of the time into it, and in a way it was sort of like an artistic diary. I was glad to let that little chunk of my life become (hopefully) something beautiful that many people will look at and enjoy.

The Nebula Dress

These last few weeks have been crazy for me. I've been busy completing art projects, starting art projects, working on writing projects, planning my school schedule for next year, and simply trying to keep my head above the regular flow of homework. I have not been getting as much sleep as I would like, and my brain seems to be hyper-active and I'm stressing out to no end. But, two weekends ago I set aside my Saturday night to devote simply to being social and going to a school dance.

So let me just star by saying that I love nebulae.

This craze all started last winter when I stumbled across a Christopher Kane nebula dress in a magazine. But, I was absolutely distraught when I saw the incredibly high price of all of these nebula dresses. So, for the next few months I experimented with painting nebulae. This ranged from nebula backgrounds on paintings to creating a pair of shoes with nebula on them.

So after about a year of this obsession, I decided I would take on trying to paint a dress. I finished it on New Years Eve, and it made its first debut that night. 

 And here's the final product! I used a sponge to layer on the colors, and splattered white paint over the skirt for the stars. Then, I glued small rhinestones onto the skirt as well.

So a couple of weeks later, I went to a school dance with the boy next door and ended up having a really good time. I got many compliments on my dress and its originality. And after more than a year of being obsessed with nebula clothing, I have finally created a dress that I absolutely adore and want to wear everywhere.