Metamorphosis Final Piece

This week, I worked on my submission for the Dali Surrealism contest/show thing. I un-giffed the fish I made last week, and polished it up in order to bring out the idea of metamorphosis. It took copious amounts of effort and lots of frustration of the worst order. I was ready to give up on this incredibly sinister fish. The tail posed a particular problem for me. I had to scrap the tail more times than I could count, but in the end, it was worth the effort.
The overall theme for this year's Dalí show is metamorphosis. In my piece, the metamorphosis is well, meta, meaning it's multileveled and self-referencing. The idea begins with a fish with an eye for its body. Move up to the next level, the fish itself becomes the pupil of the larger eye that fills the foreground of the piece. I also carry on this idea of concentric things with the dots within dots within dots. Even though it is a "flat", vector-based piece, by using the multilayered textures I am able to create a sense of depth and space, helping to accentuate the surreal, dreamlike quality of this piece, as well as the underlying theme of metamorphosis. Overall, I'm really proud of my efforts, and I hope it pays off. This is one of my favorite pieces that I've ever made, and I really hope that it makes it into the show!

HOMECOMING WEEK FOR THE LAST TIME

Man, this week went by fast! Somehow, it's already the end of my last homecoming week, and its bittersweet. On one hand, I love the fact that I'm almost out of high school, but at the same time, I'm going to miss it! This week, in the very little class time we had, I was messing around with shapes, and began work on what may or may not be my next piece.

I keep changing the channel, but all I get is this stupid fish!

This week, I completely reworked the piece I began last week, taking a vector based approach rather than a painting based approach. This piece really seemed to create itself, lots of unexpected occurrences. This really adds to the surreal nature that I attempted to convey in it. I then decided to create a gif out of the piece, and when I did that, it added lots of very cool noise and grainy distortion to the piece, making it seem even more dreamlike and surreal. Overall, I really like this piece, and I'm very happy with the way it evolved from the original idea.

Tablet Time!

This week, the new intuos 5 tablets arrived! They're honestly the coolest things ever, and are massively better than the older ones. Because I somehow got ahead on my work last week, I spent this week drawing a new portfolio piece from scratch on the new tablet! I haven't finished it, but if I can get some challenges figured out, I think it can be some of my better drawing work!

Tutorial Piece

This week, I followed a really cool grunge poster tutorial to make a really cool grunge poster! Instead of using the images, fonts, and text they provided, I decided to use my own photography, a different font, and my own text, as well as creating my own "grunge texture". All in all, this has been a very productive experience.  This is the first tutorial I've done in a long time, and even though I'm much more proficient at Photoshop and design in general than I was last time I did a tutorial, I still find that I learn something every time I follow a tutorial. This one refreshed my knowledge of masks, and gave me some ideas of how to better use them to improve my work, as well as helping me hone my design skills, and think out of the box and create my own elements rather than using those created by others.

Portfolio Piece I: Alcoa Band Shirt Design

This week, I worked on the first of my portfolio pieces for the quarter. At the start of the week, I discovered a very very cool band, Alcoa. It is the very folky side project of the singer for the hardcore band Defeater, however, sonically, it couldn't be more different. In fact, the only thing the two bands have in common are well written lyrics and music. Being a relatively unknown band, there aren't very many t-shirt/ poster designs for them, so I decided to make one of my own. This piece is the result.

The Multiple Exposure Art of Dan Mountford

Last week, I posted about five digital artists who made very strong surrealist art. After viewing the work of these artists, as well as 30 others that were chosen by my classmates, I have decided to create surreal artwork in the style of my personal favorite of these artists, Dan Mountford.
Dan Mountford creates stunning multiple-exposure artwork that makes for a powerful surrealist experience. He does much of the work in-camera, with some post processing in photoshop and other image manipulation tools for most pieces.

My favorite of his pieces takes the face of a woman and overlays a building scene and a vector drawing over her face. It's overall a very strong piece, in that it creates emotion, but I don't quite understand why it does, which is perhaps what makes it that much better than a lot of other works of art.

I like this piece a lot too. It is a much simpler piece, however, it is still powerful. The texture of the cigarettes seems to have depth, rather than being flat, which makes for a much better piece.

I really like this piece because it shows many different subjects overlaid over what appears to be some sort of dog/bear creature, yet does not feel cluttered. Often, with this many subjects, a piece will appear cluttered or messy and detract from the overall feel of the piece, however, in this case, its the many animals overlaid over the dog/bear that make the piece so strong.

Though this piece is simpler than many of his other pieces, I find that this one still has the same careful, deliberate composition and the same ability to create thought and emotion in the viewer in such a subtle manner you may not even notice it right away.  The way I understand this piece, the girl is thinking about the beach scene, as if a fading, but fond memory of days past.

As with the previous image, this image is relatively simple, yet potent. For me, the way the overlapped fingers seem to make sense in context with the outline of the hand upon first glance, and then it becomes apparent that there are far too many fingers for that one hand, makes for a strong surreal vibe that this piece gives off. The various skin textures are also help to distract the mind from the fact that there are extra fingers until you realize that it's from a different hand.