Cookie’s G9 Art Blog

My project & theme:

In this unit, I decided to create a fauvist painting. My painting was of the New York City streets and buildings in the style of fauvism. I chose to do my topic on New York City because the city-life and sights there are very alive and it would be interesting to show that through fauvism, which is also an expressive painting through color. I also wanted to express that the many lights in the New York City streets with different bright colors, which will help me bring my artwork to a fauvism style.

Fauvism, having its painters known as “Wild Beasts” is a type of painting that uses color expressively. I have applied this “wild” concept to my painting because I have used wild, expressive, exaggerated, bold and sometimes unreal colors to express the environment and condition the painting is set in.

This is an example of artwork in the fauvism style. It is a painting called the “Potato Pickers” by Maurice De Vlaminck. I was inspired by some techniques and stroke styles from this painting and applied it to my own (eg. the pathway where the farmers were standing where I applied it to the roads of my painting)

Gathering knowledge:

I started this project off with researching about the different modern art styles to help me learn about all of them and most of all, decide which one I would like to create my artwork on.

I chose to create a fauvism artwork because I like using vivid colors in my work. Also, creating a fauvist style painting is difficult and I wanted to challenge myself into doing something I’m not used to doing. Creating my artwork based on fauvism will also help me improve on my skills on layering colors.

Medium: Acrylic paint on canvas

Process:

1. Sketched 3 initial artwork designs on the same topic; NYC.

• Initial designs include writing down the colors I will use and the order/layering.

2. Chose the strongest design and transferred it onto canvas.

3. Painted the background:

• Roads with blue and applied hints of turquoise and green on top.

• The sky with pale orange and a few strokes of red and brown.

• Pavements with grey-blue

4. Painted the cars on the road (starting with base colors first, then details after paint has dried)

5. Painted buildings in the background as well as the closer buildings. (distant buildings blue and closer buildings with bold colors)

6. Filled in tiny details such as logos & street lights.

7. Outlined some objects and buildings with short black strokes.

How is my painting fauvist?

• I used cool colors in most of the backgrounds to express the cool condition and weather in my painting setting.
• I used bright colors for objects and lights to express the liveliness of New York. (”The city that never sleeps.”)
• I used bold, vivid, and slightly unrealistic colors in my work.
• The strokes and colors in my painting are considered as “wild” because they are not as smooth and blended as other non-fauvist paintings

Evaluation:

Artwork:

Overall, I think that my artwork was successful as I was able to show my knowledge on fauvism through my artwork. I successfully applied the art style into my painting and was satisfied with my overall work. However, I could have improved on decreasing the amount of strokes in my painting because it looked messy with too many different colors and there was no main focus of the painting that would immediately capture the eye. From this project, I have learnt how to layer colors more efficiently.

Research:

I am overall satisfied with the research I have produced. However, I think that I could have gone much more in depth in my art style because all the information I included in my research for each art style were very similar and balanced. Because I was doing my artwork in the fauvism style, I think that it would have been better for me to research a lot more about fauvism to get me started. However, overall, the information I have researched was enough for me to produce a fauvist artwork that matches and shows my knowledge on the style.

In general, I think that I have done better in the application part of this project than research. If I were to grade myself on knowledge and application, I would give myself a 9/10 for application and 4/8 for research because I think that I was better in creating the artwork rather than explaining what I learnt/research.

In Unit2, we created a font that represented our personalities and spelled our name in that font.

Planning:

These were the designs I created at the beginning before constructing my matrix:

Initial Design 1:

Initial Design 2:

• I decided to choose initial design 1 because it better reflects me and my personality. Design 2 had no meaning to it and it did not reflect me in any way.

Matrix:

I created a “matrix” to further describe my ideas in terms of pattern, line, shape, etc.

(I did not use any pattern in my artwork)

My ideas didn’t develop much from my initial design. The only majorpart of my idea I changed was the letter “o”. The initial design had one “o” in my name replaced by the 3oh!3 symbol and one regular “o” . This became a problem because font design is consistent. In the end I replaced both O’s with the symbol because I decided that I could not take away an idea and I was unable to find a better way to interpret this idea into my font.

FINAL ARTWORK:

Elements in my artwork:

• Colors: Most of the colors in my artwork were grey, brown, beige, and secondary colors for most of the m&ms.
• Line: crooked/bumpy lines, smooth straight lines and curves.
• Shape: mostly organic shapes

How My Font Design Reflects Me:

1. 3oh!3 (one of my favorite music artists): The 3oh!3 symbol replaces the os’ in “Cookie”

^ what it is supposed to mimic.

2. Candy (something I like to eat): A bowl of m&m’s in the top right-hand corner of the picture and m&m’s scattered around as cookie toppings.

3. Favourite TV Shows: Ideas on jewelry worn by the hand applying frosting to the letter “I”. “90210″  was written in white on the ring and “CSI:NY” was written on a yellow bracelet.

4. “Cookie”: I included this idea into my artwork by making all the letters in the form of cookies.

5. Singapore (a country I recently lived in and miss): I  included a text “I <3 SG” on one of the jewelry worn by the two hands at the bottom right corner as part of the background.

Problems Encountered:

I struggled at the beginning of painting as painted some of the tiny details first. Only later did I realize that it was less time-consuming to paint the background first as you will not struggle to fill in the details later on.

Evaluation:

Overall, I am satisfied with my work. Since I mostly stuck with my initial design, the process of creating my artwork was easy. I hardly encountered any problems and my artwork was very balanced. Although I am happy with my work, it included some flaws. First of all, I thought that I could have improved on the texture of the tray because the brush strokes weren’t smooth and it looked too messy. This created less emphasis on my font, making the focus of the artwork not eye-catching. Also, half of the my ideas are on the background so the font did not really reflect me unless I consider the background as part of the font. I also need to improve on working at a faster pace  because I had to rush at the last lesson resulting in having many visible pencil lines under the paint.

This is my finished digital art I have created using GIMP Image Editor. My first steps to creating this was to sketch a few objects I could not create digitally on the computer; the leaf, the butterfly, the two hands, the flower and the glass cup on paper. I transferred these images onto GIMP by scanning them onto the computer. Next, I colored and separated each scanned object, and positioned them into a picture. Then, I created my background, and added a real photograph I recently took of the sky. I decreased the opacity of the sky, blending the two backgrounds together. I added many modifications to my initial design. I have added the butterfly, created my background, added flowers and vines, and added a photograph. Things that I kept were the hands, glass, miniature tree, and leaves. Since it is my first time working on digital art. problems I encountered were mostly not based on ideas, but trying to work with tools on GIMP. I solved these problems by asking classmates around me which knew how to work around programs like GIMP already. I responded well to feedback because most of my reviews had said to add a photograph in my artwork, in which I added a picture of the sky to support the background. Lastly, I merged all of my layers together to form a complete image, ready to print.

The surrealist art points I included in my artwork that made it surreal was transformation, because I transformed a hand, which is supposed to have a skin base to have a leaf base instead. Another form of transformation in my artwork was that I resized the object to an unreal state. For example, I over-sized the butterfly so that it was as big has the grass palms and resized the tree to a miniature size. I also applied dislocation in my artwork because I placed tiny marbles and a tree in the glass, which cannot be found in real life. I also used metamorphosis in my work because the roots in my picture were gradually morphed into grey ashes that rose up in the sky. I also used juxtaposition in my image because I have placed objects like vines, leaves, trees, marbles, flowers and a glass in the middle of the sky where they don’t belong. I could’ve improved on my artwork by choosing a more meaningful design, as my design did not include any kind of symbolism that gave the viewer something to think about, therefore, not making it a picture that people bring back with them in their head. Also, I could’ve improved on making the whole image balanced and blended because there was a lot of contrast between the sketches I drew and the digitally created images. This would make the picture too unreal to be surreal. However, overall, I am happy with the outcome of my work.

1. Photographs of landscape edited on adobe photoshop to make it look surreal, adding items that don’t belong (dislocation).

2. A surreal art scanned using dry pastels (including both transformation and dislocation): a person looking into a pond, but her reflection is transformed. The setting is in the woods.

3. Still life painting (acrylic) with fruits and objects that look like another image (a face, or an animal)

4. Grass hand holding up glass with small tree floating in it (you will also be able to see the roots floating in the water): dislocation and transformation.

“Sons Of Man” by René Magritte 1964

How is this surrealist art?:

This artwork is surreal because of the dislocation of the green apple covering of the man’s face, which almost looks as if it is floating. It is not realistic for the apple to placed there.

Source:  ” 2009 September - buffy holt.” - buffy holt. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. <http://www.buffyholt.com/blog/2009/09/>.

“Always Together” by Vladimir Kush

How is this surrealist art?

This painting is considered as surreal art because it includes a transformation. At a glance, you will be able to see a pair of scissors, but if you look at it carefully, the pair of scissors will appear to be a dancing couple on pieces of shredded paper. It also includes dislocation because the background of the picture is the sky, making the scissors and paper look as if they are floating unrealistically.

Source: “VladimirKush.com : Always Together.” VladimirKush.com: News. Kush Fine Art, n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. <http://www.vladimirkush.com/popup.php?id=102&category=Editions/Available+Limited+Edition+Prints>.

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