carmelizedpeaches

[carmelizedpeaches]

Stuttering: Week 9 Reflection

Things haven’t been stellar in the energy and motivation department. Over spring break I resolved to work harder though, and to hopefully catch up! I did pretty good one week, but I fell behind again this past week. With senior presentations approaching, it’s do or die time. Time to crunch numbers and figure up what I have to do in order to cross that finish line! It doesn’t help that my documentation of work hours has been lackluster. I’ll tally the notes I can find on how long I worked, and if i find more later I’ll tack them onto a future post. Resolution to go forward - all notes on hours will be kept in the same journal and updated before bed each day.

At a glance: 2 hrs scheduling weeks ahead 3 hrs dwg 2 hrs driving to and from school 1.5 hrs post upd8 2.5 hrs dwg 1 hrs blog 1 hrs zoom .75 hours making this post This time period’s hours: 13.75 Year-To-Date Hours: 29.5

Notes to self: Hours to finish: 100.5 Hours per week: ~25.13 (rounded up) Decision: 5 hours of drawing each weekday to be done, excepting Mondays and Tuesdays, in which 4 hours of drawing are to be followed by 1 hour each minimum posting progress to tumblr. Effective immediately. Catch up to be done over weekend given lateness in week.

I’ve got to pick it up, and saying “screw it, do it” is a better mentality than the opposite.

[carmelizedpeaches]

Concept progress.

I’ve been down for the count in the productivity category for far too long. Due to some stressful situations and lack of proper tools to help me move forward in my endeavors, I’ve been lagging behind far more than I ever should have. I’m trying to set the record straight now, and get on top of things once more. Below are two chalk pastel art pieces I’ve worked on to push my concept into reality!

A piece I never posted here yet was some work I did on drawing a coffee cup. I experimented with recreating colors as I saw them, especially ones my eyes seemed to be fabricating. I laid in the bright colors around the edges of the cup before laying in darker values. It’s often difficult to discover where the “real” edge of an item is, so I tried recreating that beginning on the right side of the cup.

While there are unusual colors created by my visual handicap, something important to convey is how incredibly harsh lines can be. Edges are tough to look at, with the exception of scripted words fading into the background.

Something I learned from this first drawing is that I want to get smoother textures, whether using a paper towel, or other blending tool, in tandem with overlaying layers of color to achieve a smooth surface. Some of the image ended up smudging between one place and another, so my next task was to find out how to minimize that. Visually, a new problem was making the edges more vague and less certain. This was somewhat more achieved on the left side of the cup holder, and on some edges of the white areas, but could be pushed further.

After my first large foray into my chalk pastels, I returned to object-drawing but upped the ante to two objects, one being transparent. It’s the soaps from the drawing studio!

Again trying to recreate what I see, I set up the pair of soap dispensers. I was dedicated to getting a smoother texture than the cup had, especially on the  cardboard area. I started pretty rough, but then used corners of the pastels to smooth out areas. I wanted to go ahead and delineate the space I’d be working with.

Finally, I began using multiple layers of color in more capacity than I had with the first cup drawing. I put purplish pink under the orange in some places where light changed, and in others I considered using greens to offset the reddish orange of the GOJO bottle.

In the end, I did use greens to dial back the orange near the bottom and in some other places. I added back in white lines for edges inside the objects, and added the white halo around the objects. I used a paper towel to smudge some lighter areas, and to wipe away more residue than on the previous art piece. I also tested using workable fixative on the blue bottle between work sessions, and it kept most of it stable. I’ll have to get some more for myself!

I edited these images best I could to get them to look like their real life counterparts, but their vibrancy is hard to capture in an image while keeping the rest true.

[carmelizedpeaches]

Week 3 Breakdown

I will need to do 12 hours a week to make up for lost time, I think. It helps that I now have a direction to go in!

One of my first more successful studies, of a green folded paper on a wooden surface.

At a glance:

30 mins - select and obtain materials for art

30 mins - study nighttime light behavior without glasses

1.5 hours - create art studies without glasses (on mi tientes)

30 mins - more studies of nighttime lights without glasses (get more accurate data)

3 hours - drawing from observation (on white paper)

15 mins - making this post

This week's hours: 6.25

Year-To-Date Hours: 15.75

Hours to make up : 14.25

[carmelizedpeaches]

Weeks 1 and 2: Breakdown

I’m a bit behind schedule to start with, but I trust I’ll catch up with time to spare once this next week is through. Some difficulties of scheduling and obligations arose, but they’ll be over by Friday! That said, let’s take a look-see at what I’ve accomplished the past while.

At a glance: 1 hour - blog creation 2 hours - senior show direction 3 hours - Don’t Plan, Just Make 2 hours - advanced drawing research 1 hour - Finding my Direction drafting, creation, posting .5 hour - organizing and creating this post Year-To-Date Hours: 9.5

Details of hour breakdown under the cut!

1 hour - Creating and editing this blog. Finding a suitable format and tweaking it to my needs took more time than anticipated, and I’ll undoubtedly edit the blog’s features to be more appealing as time goes on.

2 hours - Researching artistic directions for Senior Show, which will influence my direction for Advanced Drawing. Upon mentioning my goals to Professor K previously in Advanced Painting, he gave me some ideas of where to look for inspiration in his own class, which led me to some interesting artists.

Mortlake Terrace, J M W Turner, 1826.

3 hours - Don’t Plan, Just Make. Given a three hour block in which to spontaneously create something, I arrived at the solution of an audaciously painted clay frog. I documented my experience along the way with ample photos.

Frog, 2020.

2 hours - Researching visual science and contemporary artists. Using the university library and its resources in tandem with the information available via the web, I looked into how to create art that others will optimistically perceive as I wish them to. Definitely expect a separate post soon detailing all the ins and outs!

Reflections, Roger Dellar, [date unknown].

1 hour - Finding my Direction blog post. This took a while and was a real doozy to do, but it feels good to get it all down! I’m excited to begin experimenting with how to recreate visual effects with my own art materials.

[carmelizedpeaches]

Finding my Direction.

In starting research for this class, I wasn’t sure what to do at first. When the professor asked us what we thought of when she told us to think of a drawing, some of the first things that came to mind were marks intricately woven to make figures’ face, linear marks and crosshatching combining with more organic forms to inevitably create a face of some woman. When tasked with what to do for the semester, however, I’d found it puzzling to come up with a clear goal at first.

I knew that for my Advanced Painting class, I was looking to play with perceptions. I want to showcase what I think is beautiful and awe-inspiring to me personally, which mostly revolves around the interaction of light with other surfaces. I seek to unnaturally boost the saturation of images to attract viewers to the beauty light holds in and on objects in nature. By exaggerating the colors in these images, I hoped to guide others’ eyes to see like mine do.

A raw image I took of the “green” trees as affected by the light of both the lamppost and the sky.

The image edited to be a slight exaggeration of how I remembered the intensity of the sky that day. This is the picture I’m creating a watercolor from now in Advanced Painting.

I found some inspirations both older and newer. Henri Matisse has some works that stole most of my attentions during my first research session, but contemporary artists had their place in my gaze as well.

Farmyard in Brittany, Henri Matisse, 1897.

Jill Ingram, [via Facebook,] posted Feb 21, 2019.

I got to thinking about perception, and how else I could expand on the topic. How else could I make others see the way I do? Or, could I make others see in ways minorities do, like the colorblind, or otherwise visually impaired folks? Could I simulate astigmatism, or eye strain, with art? So began my dive into the science of Sight.

I began looking into the causes of ocular fatigue. Research yielded some interesting results! Firstly, some sources claimed that blue light and other higher frequencies of light cause more strain to the eyes. Other sources claimed that bright yellow was the worst color on screens, due to the fact that the color works both red and green cones in the eye, which is roughly two thirds of the available color-perceiving cells. In this train of thought, I hypothesize that magenta, the “nonexistent color,” could be similarly jarring.

Conveniently, the most painful colors can be found in your printer.

Instead of color, some sites I visited attributed a large amount of visual fatigue to the contrast between two colors adjacent to each other. For example, white against black, bright red against vibrant blue, and other combinations can provide eye strain to the observer.

I came across something named the Light Reflectance Ratio in my search. This ratio measures not exactly of the value of colors, but the amount of light reflected by those colors. On the backs of paint chips or in otherwise easily seekable locations, this value should be listed as the Light Reflectance Value (LRV). This is evidently used in Interior Design, and the Illuminating Engineering Society in the United States recommends a maximum 3:1 ratio between a visual task and its surroundings. Put plainly, that means that any colors in a given area are recommended not to be too bright or dark in comparison with other objects in the room. If I compare this with my earlier findings about contrast, it lines up, and these ratios give me a minimum range to push past and a tool to judge colors by should I choose to use this method to obtain visual discordance.

The site colormatters.com was a great tool for me in the latter half of my scientific research! After a few dead ends involving colorblindness and metamerism, I happened across a graphic much like the next one in a forum, or all places, where a debate was going on as to what is the most painful thing to look at.

The intensity reminded me of how it feels to look at things without my glasses on, and it clicked - I could use these optical quirks to have my own work make people feel as I do when I can’t see properly.

I took off my glasses in the library and looked around, noting how the edges of things interacted with themselves, things repeating, edges bright white and off-colored, lines hard to observe the further away I was. Though I had yet been unsure of if I was to proceed doing representative work or abstract, I at the very least now have a look I want to achieve.

[carmelizedpeaches]

Don’t Plan, Just Make.

In attempt to discover which style of art-making suits me best, I’ve taken a few hours to hone in on different approaches. This post details the creation of a little frog from a free-flowing thought process.

Not thinking about my project until I got home proved tiresome, but I felt freed when the three hour block I’d set aside arrived. I went to my room and snooped around for whatever art supplies I had lying around. I could have done a charcoal or graphite work on paper... figure drawing maybe? I deemed it would take too much planning to do that. So, I thought, what do I have that requires no thought beforehand to work with? My eyes settled on my mostly unused lump of artist clay, sitting in a clear drawer, carefully wrapped and sealed in a box. This, I deemed, would suit the project parameters.

Without hesitation, I sat down at the dining table and carved out a piece using an old knife. I didn’t know what it would become just yet.

I started carving some corners away, then noticed the shape vaguely reminded me of a frog.

I figured, why not make a frog? It made me smile to think about, and anything that makes me happy is worth my time.

I started carving out basic shapes from above...

...and from below. Polish could come later when the basic form felt right to hold.

I carved out where generally his little arms would go, and where the hind legs would be, in addition to shaping his back roughly.

Already looking pretty frog-like!

I smoothed out the belly a little just to get it out of the way, too.

Then began the difficult task of carving legs from those mounds of clay. I was half tempted to leave them angular lumps, but I figured with my time I could do more than that. His arms I made start from the realistic place on his sides, too, instead of from the back.

Next I carved his back to have the lumps commonly found on frogs and toads, and the proper divots and the like. I carved this from memory of holding plenty of frogs when I was younger, and aimed to make it just as I remembered. At this point I deemed I would make the feel of the frog the most important, no matter what it may look like.

His arms finally began looking like arms! As did his legs. I made his stance a little wide, but I’ve only ever held frogs splayed in my hand, so I hadn’t the memory for it. I used google images of frogs to make the limbs seem realistic.

By the time I reached his belly, it was already too late for some of his toes. They’d chipped off in a few places. The clay was too tough to work with past that point, so I had to let it be. I’ve held a few frogs missing toes, so it doesn’t spite realism.

I did a little more contour work to his top side and legs, making them a little more rounded while retaining some of its angularity.

It already looked so perfectly froggy to me! Bemused, I took a picture of the frog amongst the remains of his shavings.

Two hours in, I’d done all I could do until the piece dried. So, I left the little thing and went to other tasks.

Upon my return, I decided to paint him. What else would I do with the hour left of my time? Though, I’d no idea what colors to use. Instead of taking time to evaluate, I shoved those thoughts aside and focused on texture before honing in on color. I used acrylic modelling paste to form the beginnings of textures on his back, and to act as a white base coat for the paint to come.

After he dried, I colored him. I got so hung up in coloring that I didn’t take as many in-progress pictures!

The finished product had paint bumps where warts would be, and the belly smooth as a real frog’s. The colors were not as important, but I decided to make the visual textures match the physical ones. The back was stippled with layers of paint in order from brightest to dullest to create depth, and the belly was gradated from green to blue, front to back. I had a lot of fun petting him when I was done.

Overall, I highly enjoyed this method of creation, but I miss some aspects of planning that could have provided a more cohesive color scheme for the little frog. I’ll see how I fare in the next form of creation: planning, then making.