Fall 2013 Blog Entry #6

Last night, I watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 at the AMC theater inside the Tysons Corner mall. I must say how easily clever it was to come up with the concept that has these "foodimals" (created by Flint Lockwood's food-making FLDSMDFR invention) roaming all over Swallow Falls after the 1st film from 4 years ago. I thought the food names were very creative. The Shrimpanzees, the Cheespider, Tacodile Supreme, Fruit Cockatiels, Hippotatomus, Bananostrich, Watermelophant, Peanut Butter & Jellyfishes, Mosquitoasts, Buffaloaves, Flamangoes, Apple Piethon, Wildebeets, etc., you name it! It's almost as though they could be done by children for their art school projects. If I were me, I would come up with my own Foodimal! For example, I think it should be a "Carrotbou" (a caribou made out of carrots) or the "Grizzly Pear" (a huge bear made of pears, with the stalks as its claws). While I still think the 1st Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is more meaningful than the 2nd, I thought this would be like an inspiration to allow kids into making any kind of animal out of fruits, vegetables, or other types of food for their art classes. Although I am actually taking an art class that only uses computers, this might be an excellent opportunity to come up with my own ideas of food-animal names and design. I should probably thank author Judi Barrett and illustrator Ron Barrett, whose 1978 book was loosely-adapted into two Cloudy films, for pushing the animators at Sony Pictures Animation into coming up with this imaginative concept.

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #5

This is my first Computer Graphics II art project at Ms. Jocelyn Sowa's class of this year's Fall Semester of 2013. Ms. Sowa has reminded me that I am free to make up a proposal of whichever type of project I would like to make each week, rather than work on what the other students are assigned with. This is due to the fact that I have already completed my Computer Graphics I class last year. I am thankfully relieved to hear about this.

During the second week of Ms. Sowa's computer art class, I was preparing to work on my own proposal for the next assignment. I thought about reinterpreting one of the famous art works as a handmade version of my own, with a little tweaking from one of the Adobe programs. I chose to use Adobe Illustrator to add in some colorful details to match with the accuracy and texture of "Starry Night," a beautiful art vintage painting by Vincent Van Gogh. The picture above this paragraph is the final version of my Illustrator-made Starry Night painting, completed as of September 7-8th, 2013.

This is the Starry Night painting before I reimagined it as an Adobe Illustrator drawing. It was actually from the Gerhard Gruitrooy book Van Gogh: An Appreciation of His Art, scanned by the Epson scanner at my house. The main differences between these two images above were the colors. Particularly, the lighter blue replacing the light-dark blue wavy lines on this original painting of Van Gogh. The Illustrator version has a lot of radial yellow-blue lines, made by the Gradient tool. The church-like building and other miscellaneous houses were loosely modeled after the buildings in the scanned image of Starry Night. I did not drew in some more houses, as all I drew in the Illustrator program are the floating shapes and green bushes. But I doubt the students or Ms. Sowa will mind. It took me like a while to get them to correctly match exactly as they were, compared to Vincent's work. All in all, I had a neat experience working on my first computer art project in the past 2 weeks.

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #4

In two days, it will be my 22nd birthday this week! Presenting my "birthday blog post," students will see just how creative I am with anything that is art-related besides just drawings and computer graphic stuff. And this is one of the moments that I will never forget after graduating from high school and moving into college.
These were made at Oakton High School during my 9th grade year. Ms. Rogers, my old art teacher, lets me and the other students to make things out of clay. I made the five square shapes into a simple box, with the sixth square as a cover. On each side, there was a clown face, a star, a crescent-shaped moon, and a lightning bolt. After it was cooked in the oven, I painted the clay box with a variety of colors, including blue and yellow. But my experience working with clay art made me want to create a character from one of the works of Aardman, a British stop-motion clay animation studio that was known for Wallace & Gromit. I made a green slug from Flushed Away, the first ever CGI-animated film at Aardman, which came out in theaters during the first week of November 2006. My teacher thought it was cute. But do please disregard the mistake on the slug's left eye; it might've been stuck with my other clay art product while it was in the clay oven. It feels sad that Aardman is no longer in partnership with DreamWorks Animation after producing Chicken Run and the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
But best of all, making things out of clay is one of the creative techniques that I have done when it comes to art. However, I wouldn't want to make everything a "messy week," since I am now more into computer art.

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #3

Prepared to be amazed by another one of my art masterpieces. Just like the pastel drawing from my last post two weeks ago, this was done in the same classroom during my summer school year of 2009 at IFTA. The ancient Egyptian pyramids in this drawing reminds me of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a Michael Bay-directed blockbuster sequel to the 2007 live-action Transformers movie. I have used a lot of charcoal to make some dark, shadowy details to match with the sunset over the pyramids. This is apparently my favorite artwork of IFTA 2009 at Robinson Secondary School. The orange sky is what made this the most beautiful pastel drawing that I have ever made.
I thought of the pyramids as my next pastel drawing assignment after completing the previous projects. My teacher doesn't seem to mind, apparently. First, I lightly drew the blueprint designs on a large construction paper with my regular pencil. To make the pyramids more realistic and three-dimensional, I used my finger to rub off the charcoal dust and then use the pastels to color the details. Drawing the pyramids was very easy for me; it is as though I seem to have remembered where they are placed in. The charcoal part is very challenging, because I use as many charcoal sticks as possible to make the ground completely black. Later, I drew a local person riding on a camel, looking at the three pyramids standing next to each other.
The Egyptian pyramid drawing is currently picture-framed on the wall of the family room in my house. My parents were always impressed with my amount of work when I took IFTA every summer from 2007-2011. Egypt is where I wish to go visit there someday, as it was used as a major filming location for the final scenes of Transformers 2. It seems too bad that I might not go there, probably due to international problems.

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #2

One of the best, and my favorite, artworks that I have ever done at IFTA during the summer about 7 years ago. This is a painting with a portion of the famous 1884 French painting by Georges-Pierre Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is from a magazine page for my classwork assignment at painting class. I have struggled hard to get this painting as accurate as the original painting, regarding the details and the amount of space. It must be a wonderful experience for me to demonstrate my painting skills at summer school.
I was given a large canvas by my painting teacher to work on the painting that will resemble the magazine part that I have selected, using some duct tape to confirm my choice. Next, I received a box of acrylic paint tubes for any possible colors that I might need for the Seurat painting. By using any kind of paintbrush, I carefully brush the details and frequently wash them off with water for a new paint color. The most challenging part of my own painting is probably the umbrella, due to the difficulty of trying to get the pole-stick object correspond with the big, black umbrella that was supposed to be placed over the trees as seen in the original painting. I used a lot of black and white colors to create some shadowy details. My favorite part is the optical perspective, specifically a three-dimensional view of the lake that looked like it was seen faraway in real life. It took me about a few days to get this painting done before I leave painting class towards the end of my summer school year at IFTA in Robinson Secondary School. This painting was soon brought to the display area with the other paintings and art projects for students to see along the hallway near the cafeteria.
This painting is in the living room of my family's house, which should really surprise the guests during the parties. My mom is very happy with how excellent I am with my art skills as a painter. I used to love painting when I was little, but not this kind of painting that requires complex techniques to make a more realistic painting.