Non-Objective Painting

Hey guys! How are you all doing?

Sorry, I haven't posted in so long, I've been very busy with school work and dance. But today I have brought to you one of my newest pieces. I actually completed it last month but hadn't had the chance to post it up.

For my CyberARTS class, we had the choice to paint a non-objective piece, make a silhouette, or design playing cards. I chose to pain a non-objective piece. For this piece, we needed to take a collection of photographs of architecture and this is what we would base our painting on. We looked at lines, curves and angles as well as texture.

This is my non objective painting. I used acrylic paint on canvas to make this piece. I based it on some well known architecture at the front of my school. However, I made it so that if an individual looked at it in first, second, third or forth glance, they would still not know what it was. But that is the point; the painting cannot be of anything and it is not. I have merely taken inspirations from a photograph, not objects.

I have used a lot of masking in this piece to achieve perfect, straight and clean lines. Though it may seem simple to use tape but it was not. I had a lot of difficulty making sure paint did not seep underneath the tape and get onto any other parts of the painting. I spent a lot of time masking a re-masking and due to that reason, a lot of my lines became thicker than I originally planned for them to be.

I really like how I used continuous geometric lines for this piece. It is very flat but I think the simple look works great. The colours I decided to use for this piece where yellow, green and a sky blue. I started off with a very warm yellow and then added cool colours (green and blue) to balance it out so that one colour was not overpowering the others.

All in all, I am very happy with my piece and I hope you like it as well! :D Have a great day!

My Dual Portrait

Hey guys! How are you all doing?

Today I am here to show you a quick piece that I have done for my CyberArts art class. For this assignment we were asked to pick two parts of our personality and put them in a unified piece by without just simply splitting the page in half.

I chose to paint my portrait because I felt that it would do the most justice to my idea. I wanted to make my portrait very abstract and acrylic paint would be the easiest and the quickest. I used a variety of brushes in different sizes and used warm, cool and neutral colours.

Basically, my piece shows a blurred out hand reaching towards a fuzzy, undefined destination which is located at the end of a pathway. However, you do not know what that destination is; you can take a hint, but you don't really know.

For this piece I decided two use the confused and determined side of me.

I'm confused because this is my last year in high school and its the time where I should be figuring out what I want to do with my life. Right now, the future seems kind of 'blurry' to me. I don't know know what to do and that's what I wanted to represent in my portrait. To make my portrait seem 'confusing' or 'vague' I made my background very abstract; it is made up of expressionistic brushstrokes with a lot of dabbing and blending.

I am determined because although I don't know what the future has in store for me, I still want to get it; to succeed. The hand and the pathway in the portrait are the only recognizable subjects even though they are also quite blurred. This represents the fact that I want to get to my destination even though I do not know what it is; I am reaching towards it. Though again, I am confused whether or not what I am going for is real or worth while.

I am very happy with my piece. I LOVE how I did the background, I think its my favourite part of the whole piece. Especially the colours, the dabbing and the splattering. If I could improve anything about this portrait, I would probably fix the hand, it looks okay but I think I could have painted it better; the proportions need to be fixed.

I hope you liked my peace! Take Care! :D

Alex Grey

Hi Guys!
How are you all doing? I'm in my final year of CyberArts now! Exciting eh?
Well for my first post of the new semester we were asked to research an artist who created a modern or postmodern portrait that interested us. I chose to talk about Alex Grey.

Alex Grey was born on November 29th, 1953 in Columbus, Ohio. Grey spent five years at Harvard Medical School studying body in the Anatomy department as well as the department of Mind/Body. He worked with many doctors conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. Grey was asked to do illustrator work and spent 10 years as an instructor in Artistic Anatomy and Figure Sculpture at the New York University. After that Grey started to paint a series of paintings that wanted to "take the viewer on a journey towards their own divine nature by examining, in detain, the body, mind, and spirit".

I am going to talk about Alex Grey's 'Oversoul'.



This portrait really interested me. 'Oversoul' in my eyes is beautiful; I really enjoy the 3D feel that is created by the pyramid composition. Depth is added to the painting because the body of the man is created with vertical lines but the background is created with radial lines. You can really tell the difference between background and foreground; I like how Grey used lines more than colour to show them apart. Another thing I love is the repeating pattern of the eye that is used through out the painting because at first glance they look like simple radial designs. The eyes really stand out because Grey alternated cool and warm colours. Where there were warm colours grey added blue eyes and where there were cold colours Grey added red eyes. The eyes also stand out because they are integrated everywhere.

This portrait to me is very spiritual, I believe Grey was trying to show the relation between the eyes, body, brain and soul. I think that portrait has something to do with knowledge as well as the man in the portrait is looking upwards; or maybe he is looking up towards a higher being. I don't know. But I do know that I love this portrait; the overall look is very interesting. I spent a great deal of time just looking at it, taking in all of the details.

If you found this piece interesting, do check out more pieces by Alex Grey here.

Have a good night!

So, who's really inside these machines?

Hey guys!
I was stumbling upon Stumbleupon today and came across this really cool campaign (possibly German) called "Life's too short for the wrong job". Basically they're posters on the side of machines (drink dispensers, gas pump, kids ride.. etc) that give us a feeling of what people would be doing if they were actually inside working.

That probably sounded confusing didn't it? Why don't I just show you?





Cool aren't they? I actually find them very amusing yet witty at the same time. Personally, I like them because they make you think in a new perspective. When I looked at these I thought "Huh, what if there were really people inside of these machines?". I also feel like it teaches us a good lesson about our future. Also, about the photographs themselves, I feel that they were taken very precisely and purposefully; the subject matter is great! The expressions the people have in the photographs are also quite amusing. The photographs look really realistic, almost as if there are actually people inside with a class screen exposing them.

I hope you liked these images; I sure did!
Want to see more? You can visit this [www.dailydawdle.com/2010/09/10-best-lifes-too-short-for-wrong-job.html] website! :)
Have a good night!

Photography Time!

Hey guys!

I have been taking photographs all week for my CyberArts tech. culminating assignment and thought I'd share a picture with you.

Our assignment focuses on manufactured landscapes and my idea was to show factories that are awkwardly placed in random areas (between houses, in front of schools, etc). While I was taking pictures one day, I found this little factory beside a bridge near my house. I looked very out of place and I was drawn to it. This is one of the pictures I took of the factory.

This picture really interested me; the exposure of the image looked pretty cool. It doesn't really show the location of the factory but you can still tell what it is and that it is on a slope. I also found the placement of the tree on the side to be interesting. I really liked his picture and I hope you like it too! :)

Have a nice day!

Joe Fenton

Hello again!

I was stumbling upon stumbleupon.com and came across this really cool artist named Joe Fenton. What Fenton does is he makes large scale illustrations using graphite, inc and acrylic. One thing I really like about his drawings are that they look so clean and so smooth! I love how all of the lines in his drawings are crisp and clean. His ability to make his illustrations stand out and appear 3D surprises me.

I really wanted to show you come of his work! You can click on the images to enlarge them for a better view. :)

As you can see from some of his pieces, he really uses light and shadows to make his illustrations pop out; they almost seem realistic. I hope you enjoy Joe Fenton's work as much as I did! You can see more of his works here.

Enjoy! :)

Playing around with a Camera

Hey guys!

Yesterday my classmates and I were sent outside in groups to take pictures. We were told to play around and experiment with different shutter speeds and apertures on the camera.

My group members were Roshni, Rali and Stephen. Together we are going to post some of the pictures we took and explain some of or thoughts regarding them.

This is our best example of "depth of field". For this photograph we had used a lower f-stop which meant that the camera lens was wider and therefore focused on one thing. The shutter speed we used was much faster, this meant that less light was let in the camera when we took this picture. This allowed us to get a photograph that was not over or under exposed.

This was another photograph we took. This picture, we realized, was over exposed. We believe that the shutter speed was not fast enough; this let in too much light making the image brighter than we wanted it. We also did not focus on the right object when taking the picture. We feel that we should have taken a broader shot with a faster shutter speed to get more of the flowers in the background instead of the little pieces of grass. Though this image was over-exposed we did like the final product of it; It kind of looks like a painting.

This is our best over-exposed image. You cannot differentiate between the white of the water tower and the white of the clouds. We believe that the image could have been better if we made the f-stop higher. A slower shutter speed was good for this image because the subject matter is still; there is no motion. We did like, however, the composition of the image; the way that the vertical lines of the water tower contrast with the horizon line.

This is an example of an under-exposed photograph we took. We think that the f-stop was too high and that is why the image did not receive as much light as it was supposed to. If the f-stop was lower than the image would have been brighter.

These were some examples of the many pictures we took yesterday! We hope you enjoyed them!