Wire sculpture

You have to understand that, primarily, I'm not a 3D kind of person when it comes to art. This isn't to say I don't enjoy 3D art. It just means that I don't do much of it myself, preferring to paint or draw. So wire sculpture, which I had never done before, was entirely new. But still, I thought, how hard could it possible be? Well...

The first thing I figured out is that most of my class took to wire sculpture quicker than I did. They had a blast, and one of the classes is going to do it again next week, although we're going to bring in some corrugated card board shapes as an extra element. I can't wait to see what happens.

Personal first try: butterfly on a stick (in Green Bay colors). I don't think it would be a good idea to remove it, so don't ask me to.

Dolphin jumping above ocean (sun not visible yet) in progress. 

The rare, pink one-legged songbird. My husband thought it was a chicken, but I let him know pretty quick that it was a normal bird, thank you very much.

Tree in progress.

I thought this was clever. One student made a dark thunder cloud with a tornado below it. The wind is blowing, the lightning is lightninging (is that a word?) and the birds are caught in the vortex. Drama with wire. He was totally satisfied with this hanging sculpture.

I'll try to get the rest of the photos up later so you can see the other student efforts. Who knew wire could be so much fun?

Oh, and a final tip. Don't sit on your sculpture when you're done. We found that one out the hard way.

Half-portrait project

The kids loved this project. My goal was to give them some practice in mirror imaging, observation, and working with pastels. The second class isn't quite finished with their projects, but I'm including them to show their progress.

In honor of a snow day

I forgot to post the winter pictures by the class a couple of weeks ago. We were working with gradients of color to show depth in our pictures. Very fun.

Funky fish art project

We had a great time during art class this week. I love art that doubles as funny or fun.

Da Vinci inspires...sort of

We had another drawing like Da Vinci class today. I think patience is wearing thin with conté as far as my students are concerned. I realized part way through the class that they were trying to do small, detailed images, though, rather than larger, looser drawings. I think this may be why. Still, it was fun.

Drawing like Da Vinci

We had a Draw like Da Vinci Day in class this week. I photocopied some of Da Vinci's sketches and put them up for the class to experiment with by drawing his work with their own interpretation. This was my result. I found myself loving the feel of the conté on textured colored paper, which I don't normally work with. I'd like to do more of these this week.

Working on a challenge

One of the most important things for a portrait artist is a good reference photo if she is an artist who works from photos. I prefer to take these myself, but sometimes this isn't possible. This was true in my most recent portrait.

After looking through the available images, which were few thanks to Hurricane Katrina, we settled on this one as having the best facial expression and having the most visual information. I scanned it into my computer and went to work with photoshop, lightening it to try and bring up more detail. With the face, I was fairly successful. With the tree bark, not so much.

Sometimes I don't put any background in at all, but I didn't feel that was a good choice for this image since she was leaning back against the tree. my solution was to go into my back yard and photograph one of my own trees with similar bark so I could get an idea of what the tree would look like if the photo was more detailed.

I placed it roughly with Photoshop. It didn't have to be seamless since it was only for visual reference. I could do all of my other work from the first photo. Tree bark, I discovered, takes a long time to draw, but I was happy with the finished product.