In this piece I did not play around too much. I learned how the cover of cardboard is very easy to tear. I learned how cardboard reacts to tempera, in that you definitely need an extra layer and sometimes markings on the box show through. For example in the second hill there is some areas where it is lighter than the rest. When I was cutting out the actual figures for the piece, I always made sure they would make the right shape and tried to make the original pieces I cut them out from as equal sized as possible. I also was reminded of how tempera dries a shade or two darker than the original, which is why the third hill is basically black. Another new technique I acquired was how to cut cardboard, in which I learned the proper way to cut and that I need to go through the cuts multiple times for it to be a full cut and how the knife sometimes trails off.
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Earth art is any art that does not use any artificial materials in the process of creation of the piece. With this project I learned the properties of and how to work with natural materials, namely sticks. I also kept myself engaged in the creation of this project, by going mostly every day to work on it. I persisted through all the difficulties of working with natural materials, i.e getting good structural materials, finding a good place, etc. . I also found a way to link this to myself. I am a boy scout so knowing how to make certain structures with just natural materials might help in a competition during a camp out. I am also a big fan of mythology and the way it's made, it reminds me of Lilliputians from Gulliver's Travels and how they made smaller scale replicas of our everyday items.
In this piece I become familiar with the delicate nature of styrofoam. As well as how easy it is for scissors mess up cups since it is hard for the scissors to go through. I also solved some problems. For example the ring at the top was actually broken because I pulled on it too much so I just taped it together. Also the top cup could not support itself so I got an extra cup to hold it up. I also explored with this new material, for example I had tried to go for the styrogami structure with multiple similar shapes. I also tried to use positive and negative space by having overlapping shapes to make the positive and negative space but it kind of flopped.
The thing that inspired me throughout this entire work was how free we were. We could do anything, lines, add texture, patterns, etc.. Also the medium seemed to be similar to tempera, which I prefer over to most mediums. When we were developing the piece, we first copied the part of one of our previous abstract pieces. Secondly we planned out what values correspond to the image. We then used color swathes that were close to the planned values with a color scheme of shades of blue/green. We did also tried to make the colors as close as possible for the first half of the piece. One thing I think we should have done is to not try to get the colors to an exact tee, as with what happened last time, we wasted a little time trying to achieve this. Also I think we should've used tape to make straighter shapes while painting. As well as the tools we used to make patterns were a bit too random for my taste. Due to this piece being a group effort, we had collaborated/worked together throughout the entire project. For example you see me holding the ruler while Jaun traces over the pencil lines with sharpie. I also developed some experience with acrylic and now am aware of how it dries a shade or 2 darker and how easy it is to paint over mistakes. Like how when I was painting the dark area in the right corner there is a space on the left side a bit darker than the background, we had to paint over it once or twice to make it straight using tape. As mentioned a problem I solved is to use tape along the edge it is against to make it straighter. The black line in the bottom right was also fixed using this method.
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AuthorMichael Calkins Archives
December 2017
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