Beyond Artists Observe

 Above, a plaster cast of a butt has been attached to a canvas and is currently being painted in acrylics.

For the final project in our unit Artist Observe, the students were tasked with creating a work of art based on observation. Topics included still life, scientific, figure drawing, landscape.. to name a few. Some of the more traditional solutions can be viewed here.

However, some students took the idea slightly farther than a direct recreation of an observed object. These students went beyond the observation. Here are a few example...

The original thought was to make a replica of a candle using wax.. uhm, ok. But then she decided to create a lighter instead.

She was interested in working with a still life using gum as the subject. That idea morphed into capturing the idea creating the same still life in photography. Finally, she decided she should just use the gum as her medium.

Speaking of gum, he also decided to use gum but in a slightly different way. The gum was chewed and then the chewed gum was used to create the image. 

This large work is a stencil. Each letter was cut out separately and then glued into position on top of a painted background. The letters were spray painted dark colors to represent space. Each letter stencil was then removed, revealing the orange paint below.

This wasn't his final project but was created during a unit on observation. Origami was originally folded and used as still life items. A discussion arose about how large Origami could be folded. We now have a new Apex Origami record.

After observing flowers, this sculpture was create. Each petal was created by hand sewing different types of material on the wire frame.