Student Spotlight: Jed - Art One

Student Spotlight: Jed
Class: Art 1 with Ms. Sudkamp
Blog Link:  http://apex-2016-jed.blogspot.com/


Relief art is art that has subtle, yet varying degrees of depth on a two-dimensional background; in other words, the work of art has "layers" to it. There are three types of relief: high, low, and sunken. In high relief, the raised parts of the piece protrude greatly out from the background. In low relief, the depths of the layers are shallow. In sunken relief, the designs or pictures are carved into the background, making it somewhat hollow, rather than raising the designs above the background. My wolf  is an example of a low relief piece; you can barely tell that it has multiple layers of cardboard from the picture. I picked a wolf as the subject of my relief piece because it's been my favorite animal since first grade. I love their cunningness, gracefulness and swiftness, the bonding of the individual wolves in a pack and their sense of superiority as top-level predators. I am most proud of the colors that I put on my wolf. I darkened the parts that needed to be shaded, and I was able to successfully blend the many darks and lights of his fur. The direction of the colors also portray the illusion that he is in mid-run. If I could go back and change some things about my piece I think I would change the dark spots on his coat of fur that don't quite match the rest of his fur and also perhaps make his tail more elongated to better express his sleekness

For our shadow art, we used numerous of objects to create shadows, including wine bottles, a skull, a phone, Popsicle sticks, string, diamond, and a PVC pipe with tape on it (see if you can find them in the shadows!). I thought the PVC pipe with tape was really neat and was a surprisingly good idea because when put against the projector with one end of it, the shadow on the board looked like a cross-hair. Hence why the first picture looks like we're duck hunting. Although not represented in the pictures, one image we created had a green background and water-like effect that was made by placing a sprite bottle that was cut open over the projector light, giving the skull a more evil look. The hardest and most difficult part about the project would probably be the idea part of it. It was hard to come up with initial idea of what to do, but once we had an idea, it was quite easy to piece together the necessary items to form the right shadows. Day 2 pictures were most definitely better than Day 1, we had a lot more variety of items to work with and the skull was fun to use as well.





For my perspective piece named "Frozen", I used two-point perspective, where there are two vanishing points, one on the left and one on the right. This gives an illusion of an edge in the center between the "O" and the "Z" where the two "letter walls" are coming together. To start my piece, I drew the center line in the middle of the paper, and drew four diagonal lines to the vanishing points using a ruler. Then, I measured off how much space each letter could take up, where the "O" and "Z" could take up the most space, and the "F" and "N" could take up the least space in order for it to have a two-point perspective effect. After drawing all of the letters with a pencil, I used chalk pastels to color the piece after erasing unneeded pencil marks. I obviously used blue pastels to represent snow and ice, but I also threw in a bit of purple on the border because purple and blue are analogous colors. Smearing and rubbing the pastels afterwards smoothed the colors out and made the letters pop out, the finishing touch to the piece.