Art: My attempt at John Baldessari inspired art & Photomontage

Hi there!

Today I will be sharing a piece of art I made inspired by John Baldessari melded with some photomontage. 

First off, you might be wondering, who is John Baldessari? Don't worry, I've got you covered.

John Baldesarri was a conceptual artist who influenced and transformed Los Angeles into a contemporary art place. He was an American artist who started out as a painter, and later on in his career moved on to photography. He combined his skill from painting and photography and combined them together to create his artworks.  He would paint with bright colours over black and white images. Here is an example of his work below: 

I already have blog about photomontage, so here is a link to it. 

On other blog post I wrote in November, I shared what my plan was regarding what I would make in Art class. 

Here is a slideshow which shows the process of my work: 

Overall, I had a great time making this piece of artwork. I am really proud of myself for making, but also creating a meaning behind it too.

What do think of my work?

Thanks for reading!

Art: Low Poly Drawings

 Hi there!

Today I will be sharing a low poly drawing I have been doing in Art class. Before I show you, I'll tell you about low poly drawing. 

So, what IS low poly drawing?

Low poly drawing is a technique used for modelling for video games and digital design. It focuses on using lowest number of polygons to create an image/model. Low poly minimises the detail which goes into an image being created, so it isn't as precise as its opposite, a high poly drawing. Basically, you are creating a mesh using polygons to create an image. I can tell you now, this is much, much easier said than done. 

example of low poly drawing

For my low poly drawing, I didn't know what to 'draw', at first I was going to create an image of a photomontage I did in Art last year. I decided it was too difficult and started doing a flower instead, this was even more difficult than the photomontage. At last, I decided to do a low poly drawing of my dog, Marley who is an adorable Schnauzer. 

I thought that doing low poly drawings would be a piece of cake, I was wrong. We used Google Draw to make our drawings and paired it with a browser extension called Colour Dropper to get the most accurate colours as possible. It was quite frustrating using the 'polyline' tool on Draw as it took a lot of time familiarising ourselves with how to use it. It was infuriating drawing triangles to fill in my underlying image as I kept on accidentally double clicking, stopping the line. It took some time getting used to it, but I got used to it eventually. I am going to stop writing now and finally show you my finished product!

Ta-da! I am really proud of my drawing, I really enjoyed making it and getting consumed in the process of making it. Thanks Whaea Rowena for showing us this awesome technique!

Thanks for reading!

Art: What I have been doing so far

Hi there!

Today I will be sharing what I have been doing in Art class so far this term. We have done: 

- 10 minutes of drawing outside with different art supplies

- Propaganda research 

Since Term 4 has started, after arriving to class, we go outside to draw what we see with various art supplies. We stay outside for about 10 minutes, drawing what is in front of us as best we can and majority of us go back since we have finished, while some people stay since they haven't completed their artwork. Below is a slideshow I made show-casing what I have drawn:

We have also been doing research about propaganda in class, seeing what images are try to tell us and make connections with them. At first, we did thumbnail sketches of posters trying to sway people's opinions, some were posters from movies and others were old war posters. 

After this, we created inspiration sheets with cuttings from newspapers and stuck them onto large pieces of paper. We made links between images and tried to see what connections we could make. We then started to make thumbnail sketches by combining images from our inspiration sheets with the first thumbnail sketches we did or with our imagination. Here is a slideshow showing my work:

I am currently working on doing photomontage inspired by Hannah Höch to make my 'cake trapped in a box' and will then go over it in colour, inspired by John Baldessarri. 

What do you think of my work? 

Thanks for reading!

Art: Attempted Use of White Space

 Hi there! 

Since New Zealand is still in lockdown and schools aren't open, school has become interesting. For Art class, this applies too. Our teacher set us to a really cool task to draw in a similar style of Joanna Margaret Paul. We had to try instil the use of white space. Paul would use white space to her advantage, creating spectacular pieces of work. Here is some more information about her:

Joanna Margaret Paul was a Kiwi artist born in Hamilton on the 14th of December 1945. As a child, she was always around artists and people of literature, something she and her family regarded very highly. After finishing boarding school at Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, she went on to the University of Waikato to study History, English and French. 

She graduated Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1969 and had her work featured in an exhibition while studying there. Paul passed away in 2003, her works have since been featured in Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery and the London Film Festival in 2016. 

Here is a link to the instructions if you would like to see.  I used charcoal pencils, watercolour, and coloured pencils to make my pieces, but you can basically use anything, as long as you can colour with it. Below are some attempts of mine using white space while drawing a still object. 

The images above were my first attempts at drawing using white space. As you can see, I left a lot of it. I drew one of the many orchid plants in my house, the plant didn't actually have any flowers. But, I felt like drawing a flower as my confidence levels regarding drawing were high and I had a "what the heck" attitude brewing so I went for it. Also, adding to the "what the heck" attitude, I decided to stray away from 'normal' colours and instead used dark and light brown. Something in me was drawn to them, and I am really glad I listened.  Considering these two images were my first attempts and I am not the most confident at drawing, I am pretty pleased with myself. However, I didn't colour some of the leaves properly, so they look a bit transparent. 

The images above were my attempts at using white space with watercolour. I did these a couple of days after my first attempts, since I finally found the watercolour kit I got on my sixth birthday which I was struggling to find. I used black water colour for most of my water colour pieces. However, the brown in the palette called to me again and I used it to draw a Bundaurg Ginger Beer glass. I used a thick stick I found in the back of my garden to do the drawings. I also used a cabbage tree leaf. I really enjoyed using the stick to draw the images. Depending on how I held the stick, I would get a different type of stroke which I found very cool. I would get a lot of colour onto the stick, and as it got depleted of colour I would use it to outline the next strokes I would take. Again, the transparent leaves came to haunt me, but I am still proud of my effort!

In this drawing, I used charcoal pencils to draw the image. It is from a different orchid plant, however I added a couple more leaves to it as it originally had (I accidentally broke a leaf off, sorry again mum). I used a black charcoal pencil first, then, when I had finished with my drawing I went over with a white charcoal pencil to give a "smudged" effect. When I started drawing this, I got was bit shocked because I had gotten used to the freeness of the water colour, whereas the pencil was the opposite. Transparent leaves appeared once more. But, if I keep on forgetting to make them opaque, I might as well make them a signature piece in my future drawings so they are legible. 

I really enjoyed attempting to use white space, I noticed as I did more and more drawings I got quicker at doing them too. I learned that I am masterful in drawing transparent leaves and that although it is peaceful, drawing in a garage with the door open gets very chilly. All in all, what matters is that I did the work, but most importantly, I had a lot of fun doing so.

Thanks for reading!

Art: Christchurch Street Art

Hi there!

Today I will be writing about a piece of street art in Christchurch and why we like it. Here is a link to more photos.

I like this photo because it caught my eye with all it's bright colours. If you look closer, the lips are actually made up of letters and makes you want to try read all the letters and see what they say. 

Thanks for reading!

Art: An End-of-Term Reflection

 Hi there! 

Today I will be writing about what I have been doing in Art class the past couple of weeks.

In Art, we have been recreating and studying photographs by Slinkachu, we have also been learning about another artist, John Baldesarri. 

Slinkachu is a street artist who is from England who leaves miniature figurines out and about in bustling city scenes since 2006. He waits for real life scenarios to affect the mini figures. For example, he might leave mini figures by a melting ice block in the sun and come back later and see the results.  He has three best-selling books with his various art pieces.

John Baldesarri was a conceptual artist who influenced and transformed Los Angeles into a contemporary art place. He was an American artist who started out as a painter and then later moved on to photography and also combined them together to create his artworks.  He would paint with bright colours over black and white images. 

Earlier in the year, we learnt about focal points, leading lines and rules of thirds too. Here is an image with focal points, leading lines and rules of thirds:

Here are some of the images I made which were inspired by both Slinkachu and John Baldesarri:

This is one of my Slinkachu inspired photographs which I took. This was one of my first attempts at creating a "Slinkachu Style" photograph. I'm not really happy with the photo but it helped me take better photos later on.  

This is also a Slinkachu inspired piece of work.

You've seen the originals; here are my Slinkachu-Baldesarri images:

This was my first attempt at creating my own "John Baldesarri-Slinkachu" piece of art. 

As you can see, I have "painted" on colour in various places in the image; this is what John Baldesarri did to his photographs and I feel like I have channeled this well. 

I think I have done really well making my pieces of artwork. I am proud of the work I created over the past term, and also enjoyed creating them. I have enjoyed learning about Slinkachu, David Lethinhal & John Baldesarri. I had a lot of fun creating artwork which is inspired by them too. However, I think that if I were to do this again, I would try to incorporate more of Slinkachu's style and technique into my photos because I feel like I didn't channel it enough as I could've. In this class, I have learned:

   - How to work and gain skills on Adobe Photoshop

   - How to mix different styles of art together

   - To take good photographs on various devices (iPad, smartphones etc..)

   - About different artists and how they make their artwork. 

   - How to use Adobe Photoshop on different operating systems such as iOS and

Windows

Here's a question I'll leave you with; if you could change something I have done in the art above, what would you change? Comment that down below, just remember to be nice :)!

Thanks for reading!

Art: The Dancer, The Tamer & The Person

Hi there!

This a blog post about some Hannah Höch inspired pieces of photomontage artwork, The Indian Dancer, The Tamer and The Lustige Person. Our lesson objective was to find out what processes were involved in making a Hannah Höch type image, except, digitally. 

I created 3 pieces of photomontage, all inspired by different Hannah Höch images. I first recreated the 'Indian Dancer' piece, then the 'Lustige Person' and lastly, the 'Tamer'.

Here are my recreations:

The Tamer recreation

The Indian Dancer recreation

The Lustige Person recreation

In the recreation of the Tamer, I really like the the bottom left hand corner of the piece.  In the original image, there is a head of a seal also in the bottom left hand corner with human eyes. I changed this slightly, so instead I placed a the head of a tiger in the corner and put the same eye on each side, except I flipped it so it would look slightly different. I am really happy with how it turned out. 

In my second recreation with the Indian Dancer my favourite part of the image would probably be the way the cartoon face lips kind of match up with the real face. This was on accident, I didn't even realise it fit in like this but it turned out working really cool. 

In my last recreation, my favourite part was the person's feet. In the original image, the woman's feet are a lot bigger in comparison to what feet normally look like. I like this because it makes the image seem kind of awkward which was interesting. 

I liked making photomontages as I explored a new way of creating artwork which was a lot of fun. I learned that you can create art all sorts of ways, and that art doesn't have to be perfect. It can be awkward and have pieces which don't fit in properly, but it can still be art. 

What do you think? 

What could I work on for next time?

Thanks for reading! 

Art: Hannah Höch Informational Poster

Hi there! 

Today I will be blogging about an informational poster about Hannah Höch. The poster features 10 facts about Hannah and 5 pieces of her artwork. I found it really interesting learning about her and then also making artwork which was inspired by her.

Thanks for reading!