Yikes! :D So, this is the first thing I did in art class in the door on day one. We were given a choice of themes to base a painting on (I think I picked something vaguely summer related), as a means of gauging our artistic ability. (I'm sure it was a good way of keeping first years quiet for a few weeks too. :D) Needless to say, the teacher wasn't overly impressed by my efforts, or anyone else's for that matter. Personally, I blame the paint, which was this awful powder-based stuff that you needed to pick up with a wet brush and then rub the brush into your tray to finally get usable paint. Yeah, it was totally that. :D (In all seriousness though, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't all flaked off by now.)
Coming in for particular criticism from that first exercise were the trees everyone was drawing, which now that I'm sorting through all this stuff, probably explains why we had this tree painting tutorial a few months later, though it felt a bit random at the time. You can't say that it wasn't effective though. The leaves on here were actually dabbed on with a sponge rather than a brush, which I think gives it an interesting look, and, it was kind of fun.
This isn't one I fondly remember. :D There I was the evening before school restarted in September. Suddenly, a thought came to mind: "Oh crap, didn't the art teacher give give me some work to do before the holidays; some photocopied flowers or something. If I don't get that for tomorrow, she'll kill me. I will be dead." And so, that's how I spent the last few hours of my summer holidays that year, painting these bloody daffodils. No wonder the shading's a bit iffy. Of course, after three months away from school, she didn't even remember.
This one though: happier times. This, I drew on one of the rare occasions when we had a substitute in, a substitute who basically told us to continue with our project work or whatever before going off to do whatever twenty-somethings did before Facebook was invented. Freed from the ever-watchful eye of our usual teacher, I tossed aside the flowers THE MAN wanted me to draw (or that I had specifically decided to base my project around. I forget.) and instead, drew *gasp* animals.
For a first attempt, I'd say it's a decent-ish effort. I like those sheep definitely. Everything else is a bit on the cartooney side though. Also, the more I look at it, it more it looks like the horse on the far left is (a) very tiny, and (b) about to pull off a very impressive gymnastic maneuver on that tree branch.
Vases! Yeah, I seem to have lost track of the fact that I was supposed to be designing a bowl for the 3D part of my project at some point. Hmm, those green flowers on the bottom left look a bit odd. That 'bowl' on the bottom right though, I really quite like. I might have needed to re-position that daffodil, but the fuchsias; the color scheme: this would have been such a better design for the final piece rather than the freaking thing I ended up with. :D
Here we have one of the designs for the graphic design part of the project, a book cover. I think this was a potential back cover, colored in with ink if I'm not mistaken. Oof, that sky. The rest is better, but it's all a bit flat and lifeless. The almost total lack of shading doesn't help. That's something I had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing. :D Even now, man, it's so much effort. Wouldn't it be easier if everything was just flat?
More fuchsias, as well as some other bramble-type thing. I really like the weird, skinny bee on here, whatever he's supposed to be doing. Not such a fan of the colors, which look really washed-out here.
And finally, the life drawing hits keep on coming. This one definitely falls on the lower end of the scale. Not that it's a wide-ranging scale, admittedly. Look at the size of that head and those tiny legs. Worst of all though: those feet. Yeek!
