The Landscape in Soft Pastel

I took a USCAD pastel class about a month ago where we went into the great outdoors and 'painted' landscapes.  It was pretty much the fist time that I had ever used pastels or done landscapes not from a photograph.  Pastels are a lot more difficult to work with than I originally thought that they would be.  I had a little more success when I tried using them on a piece of sandpaper (the first picture) rather than on colored paper (the rest of the pictures).

There was apparently a dragon in my landscape...

Watercolors Are Hard.

I recently did a two weekend watercolor workshop through the USCAD program at the U of S and I thought that I would post some of what I did.  I discovered that watercolor painting is not an easy thing to master.  Mixing vibrant colors was especially difficult for me.  It was also difficult having two other classes and working part time while it was going on...I am very tired now.

For the first weekend we did a lot of color mixing exercises and learned to find the lightest lights and the darkest darks first when painting.

We did some drapery studies.

And a whole lot of still lives.

We also did a winter landscape from a photograph.

For the second week we were encouraged to take what we had learned from the first week and try out different styles of watercolor painting.    We worked from photographs again and did some portraiture.

I tried out pointillism.

We also did an exercise where we had to paint the picture upside down in splotches of color.

We did a timed still life.

On the last day we had a model.  We did some warm up gestures and some quick paintings with a limited color palette.

This warm up painting ended up looking like an amazon woman...

And this one ended up looking like a fancy cave woman...

My longer pose turned out a little better, but it could still use a lot of work.

Then I did a quick tree study.

And another still life.  My teacher told me to try a more vibrant color palette.  That didn't work out so well, hahaha.

We also got to do a non-winter landscape, and I chose to do one of Loch Shiel in Scotland.  I went on a Harry Potter fan trip a couple of years ago and this was one of the coolest places that we visited.  It is also where they filmed a bunch of parts of the Harry Potter movies!  If you look really closely you might even see Harry riding Buckbeak over the water in the distance... 

I also tried playing around with some watercolor pencils that I had bought.  It wasn't turning out so great until I added some ink for the outline and gave him some fruity friends.  None of them are happy to see that pear though...

The Multiplane Forest

So at my art show a friend of mine saw one of my pieces and wanted to know how I did it. And because sharing my crafty knowledge is one of my favorite things to do, I decided to dedicate a blog post to it! This one's for you Brittany!

So the piece that Brittany was wondering about was actually a multiplane camera move from my student animated film. I wanted to somehow incorporate some animation into my show, because I had kind of been working on it for pretty much forever and I thought that maybe I should showcase it somehow. I took one of the few colored bits of my film, and because it is a multi layered animation background, I decided to make it into a multi layered piece of arty goodness. The first picture is the actual digital copy that I colored in photoshop. It in of itself is made up of probably at least a hundred different layers...

I printed each layer of the background out on multipurpose transparency film (which was freaking expensive by the way!). This is layer #2.

When I had printed out each layer I discovered that when they say transparency they really mean it, and you could see through each layer...

I decided to paint the back of each layer with white acrylic paint so that you wouldn't be able to see through the actual artwork. There were a lot of very tiny details, so this was definitely the part that took the longest amount of time.

I then broke out my super crafty powers and my secret weapon-fun foam. Using photo mounting squares I stuck a couple of squares together to add some thickness to them.

I then strategically placed them in between two of the layers so that they would be separated slightly.

I did it for each layer, and added extra squares at the top of the transparencies to help keep them straight.

When all of the layers were attached it looked a little something like this.

And the back looked a little something like this.

I placed a piece of white paper over the back to serve as the very bottom layer and the sky.

And then it looked like this!

I had a mat cut to cover the edges of the transparencies and to hide all of the foam squares.

I stuck it to the mat with more photo mounting squares and put a piece of black construction paper over the back to help block out any light that might come in from behind and show the foam squares. The frame that I had bought for it was actually a shadow box that had glass both in the front and the back, so if you were using a normal frame you probably wouldn't need the construction paper.

And here it is with the frame! (sorry for the blurry picture...)

I also made a paper version as a thank you card, but painting in all of the tiny branches was a whole lot easier than cutting them out with an exacto knife...

I finally graduated from something!!!!

Last Friday (August 6th) I graduated with a certificate in Art and Design from the USCAD program at the University of Saskatchewan! And now after 4 years and 2 different schools I finally have something to show for it! We had a graduating art show to finish up the program and my octopus chair made an appearance.

This was what my corner looked like.

The UP house was also there!

The Octopus chair got to graduate too!

My animation teacher/mentor James Clow stopped by! Kendall, Kirk and I were all students of his both at our old animation school and at USCAD.