Last few high school projects
Wednesday, June 1st, 2005
This is a small, lazy pencil drawing of John Paul II I did right after he died as a school assignment. I say “lazy” because I didn’t feel like doing it at all, so I picked a pretty basic picture–no full body shots, flowing garments, etc.–and I made it the smallest we were allowed to do. Nonetheless, I’m happy with how it turned out. This project is only one of two times that Lanciotti ever told us we could use a photograph we didn’t take ourselves, for obvious reasons. Still, it means I can’t ever do anything with this one, even if I wanted to. (pencil, 4×5)
The second agonizing watercolor still life I’ve done, but at least this one didn’t get thrown away as did the one I did at the end of last year. This project wasn’t fun (I am not a fan of watercolor or still lifes), but I did it remarkably fast for being so miserable about it. I’m also proud of the way it turned out, although I think the drapery on the left side is a little weird looking. The window wasn’t even supposed to be part of it, but I centered the picture so badly that I had to include it for balance. The landscape/trees outside it are probably the weakest part. This is also a pretty horrendous photo of it–the colors are all right, but the angle is completely whacked. At some point, I’m going to set aside a weekend for re-taking pictures of all my artwork so that they’re not so embarassing. (watercolor, 14.5″ x 19″)
This is a large pastel I did of a plaster cast/relief type thing from the art room. It was another assigned project, like the above watercolor, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have done it. This isn’t a particularly good photo–since all the values are so similar, it was hard to get it clear and stuff. I used a grand total of I think three different pastels. (Fairly certain we had to limit the color scheme, but even if not, the thing was all one color anyway, since it was plaster.) But yeah. I like it and it’s big (always a struggle for me). (pastel, 18″x18″)
