Pop Goes the Artist!

I went on a field trip to the National Gallery of Art today and saw, among other things, an absolutely fantastic display of Italian illuminated manuscripts. So I got bored and doodled my own. Admittedly, it’s far more Celtic than Italian, but I only have six colors of markers and limited skill. It’s Prismacolor markers and a black gel pen on regular white drawing paper (even though it looks grey in the photo), about 3×3.5″.

I finally brought the past few class projects to my dorm and got batteries from my camera (oh how I miss my scanner!), so here are the first few things I did for art class.

Project One: Harmony and Contrast

I’m not actually going to post my “harmony” piece, since it’s boring, uninspired, and I don’t feel like uploading it. The one I am posting is my “contrast” piece, hence all the circles and squares. I like this one much better, even though it took me probably four times as long to paint. It is also acrylic on canvas board (all of these will be), except this time it’s 9×12″.

Project Two: Perspective (Decorative/Plastic Space)

I’m also not going to post my “plastic space” painting, for the same reasons as above. All my two-part projects seem to involve an interesting idea and stupid one. Again, I like my other one much better–probably my favorite thing I’ve done so far this year. In fact, it’s the only one that actually has a title: “Point Me.” (Which I think might be a spell from Harry Potter, but it just kept popping into my mind every time I looked at it, so it stays.) All of our work, by the way, has been in black and white–we’re not allowed to introduce color yet, since we are starting from the most basic of basics.

Our latest completed project is a comic strip (which actually involves one (1!) color), but he’s still grading those so I don’t have it back to photograph yet.
Et Cetera

Hmmm, what else is new, art-wise? Not much, since all I have with me are pencils and a few prismacolor markers I just bought. I’m going absolutely insane; I have a project to-do list a mile and a half long: a 24×36″ portrait of James playing guitar for Christmas (and he already knows about it, so I can mention it), a watercolor portrait of my brother, several more pages in James’ altered book, continued work on the altered book I started right before I left, another dog portrait like Lucy’s except of a basset hound puppy on a green background, plus I want to start block printing again (4 seasons series?) AND I want to try to varnish a couple paintings, particularly Mrs. C’s for added protection, but it means I have to get it down perfectly before I touch hers. Thank goodness for all these little projects I’m doing in art class–lots of material to practice on. I’m not kidding when I say that I’m going absolutely nuts. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I didn’t have any art class at all.

Also took a trip to the Corcoran Gallery today to see the Andy Warhol exhibit. I took some pictures both in the permanent collection and in the Warhol exhibit before one of the security guards told me that “picture not allowed.” I guess there are still copyrights on those images, so no one print my crappy photos out and make postcards to sell, ok? lol. Anyway, I’m going to post them all on my webshots album, so you can see them here.

Finally, a few blind contour drawings I did in my sketchbook with marker yesterday while I was waiting for the rain to stop so I could go to Target. (You know I’m desperate when I resort to blind contour drawings.)