Welcome to my art page! This is a chronicle of all the art projects I did for Jeremy Farson's class in the second semester of senior year. The above fire art couldn't have been created without the help of Amanda Le (who, among other helpful things, taught me to make gifs) and Jeremy Farson (who gave me the tools to set things on fire durring his class).
The 1,000 Words Project
For the Thousand Words Project, we picked an existing work of art to make a reproduction of. I looked through the work of several dozen artists before settling on The Tranquil Autumn Beauty by Mee Kyung Shim. Ms. Shim is a Korean immigrant who lives and works in San Diego, whose Taoist- and Buddhist-influenced work focuses heavily on the balance between humans and nature.
In addition to reproducing the painting in art class, we also wrote short stories in English class inspired by our paintings. Each student created a short story that was exactly 1,000 words long. For more information on the stories, and for a more information about Ms. Shim, please visit the tab for 12th Grade English, Semester Two.
This painting is by far my favorite of all that I have worked on in this class. It took much longer than anything else I attempted and much longer than the other 1,000 Word paintings. I seldom get the chance to sink myself into such an undertaking, and I am very glad to have had this chance.
In addition to reproducing the painting in art class, we also wrote short stories in English class inspired by our paintings. Each student created a short story that was exactly 1,000 words long. For more information on the stories, and for a more information about Ms. Shim, please visit the tab for 12th Grade English, Semester Two.
This painting is by far my favorite of all that I have worked on in this class. It took much longer than anything else I attempted and much longer than the other 1,000 Word paintings. I seldom get the chance to sink myself into such an undertaking, and I am very glad to have had this chance.
Bread & Cie Exhibition
Abstract Watercolor
Our next project served as our introduction to watercolors. We were pretty much given free reign to create all manner of abstract designs, but it ended up being harder than I anticipated to create art that intentionally doesn't represent anything. Several of mine are below.
Atmosphereic Perspective
I created a series of atmospheric perspective paintings, entitled "Watching Over," for our watercolor unit. The premise behind an atmospheric perspective painting is that it has a foreground, a middle ground, and a background. The clarity and focus of these different pieces fades the farther back the picture goes, just as atmosphere blurs things in the distance to the human eye. Atmospheric perspectives are traditionally done of natural settings. My three are all done in this style, and are not based on any existing scene or other artwork. In addition to sharing artistic elements, they are also thematically similar.
En Plein Air
En Plein Air is a French phrase that describes the act of sitting in the open air and painting the scene before you. My class took a short trip down to the park by the bay next to Liberty Station to paint in this style after experimenting some with other types of watercolor painting. In particular, I found it hard to paint because there are so many pieces of the landscape. In the other types of water colors, I got to decide how much detail to include. But if you are trying to realistically depict an existing landscape, there are so many factors to take into account. There's all the different types of trees, and buildings in the distance, et cetera. And one of the particular aspects of watercolor painting is that you have to paint aspects of the painting from the farthest away up to the closest. With other paints, you can paint right on top of everything, but not so with watercolor. Layering the different elements correctly was also very difficult, as you can probably see from my final draft above.
Austin Jones Project
Austin Jones is a High Tech High International alumni who designs animated characters. He came in to walk our class through the basics of cartoons, and to help launch our next project. For this project, we designed our own characters by taking an existing person or character and changing it in some drastic way. For example, my character ended up being a combination of Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games series with a rat, creating "Ratniss."
To create Ratniss, I did a number of sketches to figure out the various aspects of her. There were a number of factors to consider, such as how rat paws would hold a bow and arrow, and how Katniss' hair would sit on a rat's head.
To make these sketches, I used a lot of reference pictures of real rats, Jennifer Laurence, and people with bows. I used a grand total of 43 reference pictures, so I'm not going to post all of them here. Ten of the most important ones are below.
Dystopia Project
The Dystopia/Utopia project was a interdisciplinary study of the way art and fiction can critique society. In English class, we watched several short films, read several short stories and even several books that all fall into the dystopian genre. In the end, we created our own dystopian critique of society. Students wrote songs, stories, scripts, and created other material. Check out the English page under the 12th Grade tab for more information on this! In Art class, we watched a movie and looked at the visual techniques (such as color scheme, lighting, et cetera) that are used to build a dystopian world in film. We then created art pieces that are complimentary to our English project. I created a series of sketches of scenes and characters to illustrate the story I wrote. Several of these are below. Most of the scenes I've finished are from Tamenkari's chapters, but there will eventually be an equivalent number from Nory's chapters. I also intend to have a page that introduces several of the characters, beyond just the two main characters. More are on the way!
This is a scene of Connor, Tamenkari's friend, with his sister. This particular scene was requested by Michelle Garcia, my friend and classmate. After they run across one of the local gangs, Connor is beaten up and has to be taken home. He was almost shaken enough to forget to ask Tamenkari out, as he does every day. He remembered when she was almost to the end of the street.
This is Teddy, a smuggler disguised as a homeless man who often helps Tamenkari and Connor travel up and down between the levels of the massive subterranean city in which they live. Tamenkari and Connor live on Layer 32, but a riot has occurred on Layer 34. There's so much travel going down through the shuttle chute that it's too dangerous for Teddy to help them on this particular day.