A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Landscape Painting

This summer I had a magical painting experience in Florence! It was an awesome time of growth as an artist and also an amazing adventure as a person! I loved every minute of it! When I came home I knew that landscape painting was something I really wanted to keep doing. So whenever I can, I've been travelling to different spots near my house to paint! Thank heavens it's been unseasonably warm, more days to paint! Here's what I've been up to:

This painting was from a site just down the road for our house!

Painting

Real Life

Painting

I'm not as big a fan of this one, it's a park near our house and I think it needs some more contrast.

Painting

This is at the Cranbrook House and Gardens. Beautiful area!

Painting

 This is my favorite one! It's of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club and I think it turned out really well!

Real Life

A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Social Issues Additive Sculpture

This semester, I'm taking a sculpture course as part of earning my Master's degree. I'm liking the course, but it is challenging for me, especially in the realm of construction. This first piece is a additive sculpture constructed of wood, dry wall compound and wire. It's not finished, it's taking so long to put it all together correctly!

The assignment was to create a sculpture that addressed a social issue. I chose to have my piece discuss the idea of our freedoms in this country and how, for some people, more 'freedom' actually means less freedom.

These are just in-process pictures, more to come soon!

Creating a wire loom for my metal wire weaving

Starting to do the weaving!

The structure of my sculpture complete!

A Peak Inside my Protfolio: DIY bags and the continuation of Flight

Well, I know it's been awhile, but if you're one of my teaching friends, you know that the weeks before Christmas break are hectic. Especially at the high school level, we're busting a move to get everything ready for Scholastic's Competition. More on my student's work in a later post, however; this one is about some of the work I've been doing at home.

As some of you know, I was working on a series of paintings about flight, for my graduate painting class. You can read about the first three paintings in the series here. Since that post I have finished two more paintings. One on traditional canvas, and one on metal that I cut, sanded and riveted myself! I though it was important to immerse myself in the plane-making process to get a clear understanding of what I was depicting in my paintings. Let me tell you, riveting is hard! Here are some process pictures.

Here's the finished work, can I just say, that it's so much more powerful in person.

The piece of metal, is quite a bit different. My instructor has been pushing me to move away from technical, realistic painting. And although there is still some of that in this next piece, I do feel as if I've pushed myself. There was a lot of trial and error to get there though!

Here's the metal construction that I started with. I used sheet steel, tin snips, air compressor and rivets to put this all together.

This was my first image. And although I like it, it didn't go far enough for me.

So I thought, maybe I should add color... still not what I was looking for.

So then I sanded it down and added these shapes, which I hated. So I took it to class to get some feedback from my peers.

I just needed to refine the lines and shapes a bit more, so back to the sand paper.

Here's my finished piece. I still have some of the same lines and some color but it's more developed and I think they texture and sanded areas really bring a dimension to the piece.

Okay, okay. I know this post is going on and on, but I do have a DIY that I did this last week and some fiber art that I finally finished. That's right, the embroidered backpack is finally done. If you want to read about my long battle with the embroidery, you can read about it here. But here it is in all it's finished glory!

Of course I had to use it immediately as my purse! But I was concerned about all the various things I keep in my purse snagging on the thread on the inside. So, I just quickly made a lining panel for the front side. I also whipped up a cute little DIY pouch to keep all my junk in. I used this tutorial here and it was so super easy to follow!

Thanks for sticking with this post to the end. I love doing little projects and adding to my professional and personal portfolio with different techniques and skills. Hope you're inspired to add to yours!

A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Flight Series

My students are currently working on an assessment drawing of a still life and photo students are in the film developing stages. Although I was tempted to post some still life pictures, I know we all know how to lead a project like that and it's not a terribly new idea. So for times like this, I decided to have posts either about project I'm working on or artwork I'm creating. Hence the last post about my home decor and now this post about my current work!

I'm taking some graduate level courses and right now and I'm in the thick of a studio painting class. We are working very large scale which is awesome and sometimes intimidating. For these paintings, I wanted my inspiration to come from flight. If I haven't shared this yet, my husband is a pilot and we are currently building a plane in our garage. So flying and flight have a huge impact on my life right now.

When I began thinking about flight however, I wanted to stay away from the idea of clouds and wind and blue etc... I didn't want the theme to be immediately obvious or cliche. Then I started thinking about the plane, the only way that humans can fly. The only way that we can experience flight is through a metal box and metal wings, hard and unyielding, which is totally at odds with the open and and wind currents and clouds.

To that end, I chose to do a series of paintings of plane parts that my husband has been working on. Primarily in monochromatic color schemes. To keep the idea of flight apparent, since these pieces don't appear to be plane-like yet, I made the background very airy and cloud-ish.

I haven't actually finished any of them, but they're all awesome works in progress and I'm excited about this series.

Just finishing the background area of the first painting.

Here's my sketch of the basic shapes.

Blocking in darks and lights.

Refining...

And more... it's almost done, this is how far I am :)

Number 2, same process.

Pretty much finished I think...

Third piece, this is the only one that is for sure finished.

A Peek Into my Portfolio

Some of you might remember that I painted a red panda for my brother, who is an animal enthusiast, over the summer. He asked me to to do one of a one-horned rhino right after he got the red panda. Of course, it has taken me from the summer until this week to finish it. Getting married and beginning at a new school put a stop to extra creative projects for a little bit. Anyway, it's done and I love it. What's better, my brother loves it too! Here is the progression of my one-horned rhino painting in oil paints:

These are obviously just in the beginning stages, laying down a lean layer of paint to block out where I want the basic shapes, and then beginning to fill in darks and lights.

I finished filling in the large areas of dark and light and begin on the background. I used a metal palette knife for the background to give it some texture and suggest foliage.

Then I added texture. As you might imagine, there is a ton of texture on a rhino. In a lot of places, I only hinted at the texture.

Then I decided that I didn't like the muzzle portion so I painted over that area, re-doing the darks and lights and then blending them together and re-adding texture. I also redid the horn.

And here is the finished piece! Thanks for taking a peek inside my portfolio!