Month: February 2018

This is my latest project that is still in progress.

L    This project was a little bit later into the year and you can see that it is much smoother than the other one.

Looking back at all of my artwork from the beginning of the school year to now, I can see many of the skills that I have improved in. One of the skills that I think I have improved in quite a bit would be working to smooth out every area of all my artwork. This may seem like a small factor but I’ve noticed that one of the main things that made my earlier artwork not look so impressive was because of all of the cracks. When I started to take my time to smooth out all of the cracks, it made a huge difference in the appearance of all of my pieces.

I have also noticed that I have not really worked as much to do research before starting my projects, I usually like to think about my own ideas and try to use my own imagination. For example, in Blog Post #7 I said that, “I used sketches and a maquette to help plan my 3D artwork so that I could have a good visual of what I want my piece to look like…” . I never mentioned doing any online research at all. However, I do realize that doing some research and looking at some other pieces of artwork can aid in my thinking process and might my artwork turn out to look nicer.  I also feel that I need to also work on adding more of a deeper meaning to my artwork. Whenever I plan a piece that I could make, I usually never think about the meaning behind it, the reason why I am making it. I feel like that would also be a goal for next quarter for me.

This is one of my pieces from the beginning of the year. As you can see it has a lot of cracks in it.

This is how I usually plan my projects out instead of  doing any online research.

*These are pictures of the maquette and my sketch

Artists Plan

My artwork conveys the theme “Up Close” because it includes many elements that require the viewer of the artwork to come up close in order to see many of the details in the piece. Such as the petals inside the coffee cup may look like a flat swirl of whipped cream but it is actually a rose when you come up closer. Other details would be the leaves going around the rim of the cup (not added yet), the roses around the cup and down the handle (also not fully added yet).

Some elements or details that I am including in my artwork so that viewers understand what I am trying to share would be to try to add as many roses and leaves and vines in every spot of the cup in order to show that nature is everywhere and that most of the things we enjoy come from nature. I am also trying to completely surround the coffee cup with roses so that it looks like bush of roses shaped into a coffee cup.

Artists Plan

I used sketches and a maquette to help plan my 3D artwork so that I could have a good visual of what I want my piece to look like and so that I can easily plan out my piece and all of the details. I made a maquette so that I can see how I am going to make certain parts of this piece and how I am going to connect them to the cup.

Some challenges that I considered when doing the preparatory work was that the petals will be a bit hard to place and connect because they are very thin and may not be so sturdy. Also adding the leaves to the rim might be hard because I want them to be a little bit curved and this is hard to achieve with plastic clay.