Old Art
Some stuff from my high-school art classes, in the order I did them.
#1, #2: Freshman Year. Wow, was I bad at shading! #1 is a still-life. Pencil and pen on paper. There was also a third version drawn in colored pencil, but I cropped it out because it’s awful. The figure depicted is a candle-holder. #2 was made as an abstract art assignment, and it is a tempera-painted poster paper, cut and mounted on more paper. I based it off doodles I make by putting a pencil on a paper and trying to fill the whole page with a continuous line that never crosses it self. This creates a weird, wiggly shape. I painted the inside of the shape in a red-to-yellow gradient, and the outside in a blue-to-green gradient. I cut it into jagged pieces because I thought the project needed something extra.
I wasn’t too serious about my art class. Most days I pretended to work while I goofed off with the people who sat at my table. I still got an A! Oh, freshman year…
#3, #4: Sophomore year. #3 is a still-life. Oil pastels on paper. The teacher chose the subject and the medium. This was a challengning project for me because oil pastels are so hard to use. You have to build in value by layers, but eventually I got so many layers that any pressure from new work would push out a chunk of oil pastel off the paper. I also had a limited time to get in the basic shapes before the peppers rotted. If you look closely you’ll see small flecks of blank spots in the peppers and the shadow. No matter what I did, certain little spots of the paper refused to be covered. #4 is chalk pastel and colored charcoal pencils on paper. It’s based off a photo I printed out after googling “Costa Rica sunset.” I spent longer and this piece than anything else that year. I thought the layering with oil pastels was bad, but this was a nightmare. The sky was a real problem. It probably has 13 layers, but you can still see the grid showing through. The colors were darkened and muddied by the fixative spray. (The teacher was surprised at how much damage the spray did, since I hadn’t applied it wrong. The ocean was changed the most)
I was much more focused in this class. I only had one friend at my table, (my best friend) and we both we very competitive about who could make better art. Her peppers turned out better than mine, but my chalk pastel project was better than hers. (After all, she never finished it).
#5: Junior Year. Oil on board, copied from a photograph I took. (I was fostering a litter of kittens and I used them as subjects for my photography. I put Shady in a jar, expecting her to jump out immediately, but instead she sat nicely and sniffed the air. I put the jar on the railing of our deck and snapped some pictures). This was my first oil painting, and it took me 3 months or so. This class was an independent class where my best friend and I were by ourselves, drawing in the supply closet of the art classroom. Oil was a great medium to work with because mistakes can be easily corrected by slapping on some more paint. That’s good for me, because my process of making art is trying, screwing up, and fixing it. I painted in sections. Sometimes a section would be painted and finished, but then I would realize it was bad and completely re-paint it. (This happened with the face, the railing, and the jar.) I’m mostly happy with how this turned out – except for the edges of the kitten where I tried to paint wispy hair. I hate that part.
#6: Senior Year, and the last drawing I completed for a high-school art class. Pencil on paper, still life. The assignment was to bring in sentimental objects and pin/tape them to a board. The objects are: metal horse figurine, driftwood, Guatemalan doll, my dedication bible, a bandana, very old Barbie clothes, a photograph, a Bitty Baby shoe, a piece of a seashell, and a Sharpie pen. The point of the assignment was to use the objects to create some kind of greater meaning, but I used stuff that I thought would be fun to draw or would look good. This drawing took me a whole semester! It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.
