Painting

As the pencil sketching portion of my passion project is finished, I will be moving on to a new art type. So for my next art "unit" I will be focusing on painting. Probably watercolour, and maybe some other types as well if I have the time for it.

I have done some painting in the past, but usually I try to avoid it. I am not very comfortable with it at all, probably because I simply never do it. See, with sketching and pencil work you have a lot of control over what the finished product will turn out like. Its usually pretty easy to make your sketches have the type of pencil strokes you want, and you can always use an eraser if you make a mistake or want to do something over. With paint its not that easy, at least not for me. Especially with watercolour, the end result will rarely be as you expected. Its also a lot harder to control and you can't exactly use an eraser! :)

So I will soon be starting on some paintings for this portion of my blog, and I hope that they will turn out how I would like them to. But even if they don't, I suppose that I will learn from my mistakes and improve all the same!

Progress!

Here is another one of my completed portraits. This one is of my lovely sister Nicole, from a picture that I took  of her when she was 11. I am quite happy with the way that this picture turned out, and I was super exited to try out my new sketching pencils!

I have actually drawn this picture twice, the one above is the latest one that I have just finished. The first one that I did I drew almost 2 years ago. I sketched this picture again mainly because I wanted to see how I have improved in my sketching, and how much progress I have made. A big part of a passion project is measuring your progress, and sometimes this can be a little difficult with art, so I thought that this would be a great opportunity to see how far I have come.

Here are the two sketches. The one on the left is the one that I drew almost 2 years ago, and the drawing on the right is the most recent one. Its safe to say that I was pretty pleased with myself and pleasantly surprised when I first compared them. The second picture is noticeably better than the first, and I have gotten more comfortable with shading and adding darkness and shadows to my sketches. The second one is also a much more recognisable picture of Nicole, and I can see that my techniques have also improved!

Another portrait

This is another one of the portraits that I have been drawing, and it is the first sketch of someone that I, and possibly some of you reading this, know. It is a sketch of my lovely sister Kyra.

I was pretty happy with the way that this sketch turned out, although there are definitely some things that I have to work on with my future sketches. I used a normal "school pencil" and as you can see, the pencil strokes are very noticeable. I was having a hard time making them even, but hopefully with practise I will be able to eventually improve and make the strokes less noticeable. I am still trying to stay away from smudging my drawings ( though in this one I was very tempted!) :)
I also had a little trouble drawing the mouth, and those of you who know Kyra might notice that that part of the drawing may be a little off. And as for drawing the hair, I have decided that I might need a little more practise with that.
I recently got a pack of sketching pencils which include both light and dark pencils, so I am planning to play around with those and hopefully they might be easier to use for shading and such.

Sketching faces

These are the sketches that I started with, and I am pretty happy with the way that they turned out. I got the origional sketches off of Pinterest, so I don't actually know the people in the pictures.

I did these first drawings off of sketches already done by other people, because I figured that it would be easier to learn that way. By doing this, I could see the pencil strokes and the techniques of others and learn from them, so I could later use those techniques for my own pictures! Also, if I start by drawing pictures of people that I don't know, then if I make a mistake or change their appearances accidentally, then no one will notice. Since I am just starting, this way I will not be pressured to make the sketches look perfect and I can just use them for practise. Hopefully that makes sense!
I have already started on some sketches of people that I know, and I have finished one of my sister, Kyra, that I will be posting soon!

A Change In plans...

I have decided to spend more time on the sketching portion of my project, especially the drawing people part of it. After doing a bit of sketching of faces, I realized that 2 weeks on this topic like I planned would not be enough to actually get much accomplished! I really want to improve in this type of art, and to do this I must practice more and do more. I have done some portraits to start with, and I hope to post them in this coming week.

Some sketches...

 As I said before, pencil sketching is probably the type of art that I am most comfortable and confident in, and I do enjoy it. Usually I use regular "school" pencils, but this time I used an actual sketching pencil, and I didn't really  notice a significant difference between the two. I enjoy sketching because everyone has their own little techniques, so there is no right or wrong way to do it, and everyones drawings are a little different and unique.
Here are the two pencil sketches that I have done this past week. I am very happy with the way that they turned out.

One of my techniques is that I NEVER smudge the pencil strokes, which is what a lot of people tend to do. I have seen many, many drawings that have used smudging and look fantastic, but personally I don't like the way it looks on my own pictures (or maybe I am just not very good at smudging :) ). I prefer to use tiny pencil strokes to do the shading, and I like the look of this much more than what it tends to look like when I smudge it. Another weird technique/thing that I do is that my pencil ALWAYS has to be sharp. I find that it is much easier to do detail and shading this way.

So that concludes the object/animal part of the sketching unit of this blog. Next up, is portraits and sketching people (Eeek!).

Sketching

The next type of art that I will be posting about is sketching. Pencil sketching, to be exact.
I have done sketching ever since I was a little girl, so it is probably one of the first types of art that I have ever done. Also, I think that its safe to say that sketching is the type of art that I am the most comfortable with, and I enjoy it very much.
However, the one thing that I am not as comfortable with, is sketching people. I think that is because the drawings have to be "perfect" or it will not look like the person or look unnatural. That is a little out of my comfort zone, and I would prefer to draw animals or objects. But since part of this project is about getting me out of my comfort zone, I will also be working with portraits and drawing people.
This weeks posts, however will focus on drawing animals or objects, and I will work my way into sketching portraits probably by next week.

Felting

Felting is a rather bizarre form of art, in my opinion, but I do enjoy it. I used two types of felting techniques for this unit: wet felting and needle felting. Felt is the oldest known fabric making known to man, but you can read more about that in my previous post.

 With felting, every art piece is a surprise, because you really only have a small amount of control of what it is going to turn out like. It is an unpredictable form of art that is different every time. I am very happy with the way that my picture below turned out, and I had a lot of fun making it.

 

I started with the background of my art piece, in which I used wet felting, and I will list the steps that I did below.

1. First I took a sheet of bubble wrap and spread it out with the bubbles facing up. I then took the colours of wool roving that I needed (when I say "wool roving" I mean balls of colourful fluff meant for this type of art) and pulled out little thin bits of fluff and laid them out on the bubble rap. More than one layer is needed, and you must change the direction of the felt with each layer ( one layer horizontal, one layer vertical, etc.).
2. Then you must sprinkle soapy water on the felt and fold the bubble rap over it. It works best if you also wet the top of the bubble rap with water, and maybe some soap to make it slippery enough.
3. In order to create the friction that will fuse the wool fluff together, you must rub the wool through the bubble wrap in all different directions (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, etc. etc.) Continue this for a while until the wool has fused together.                                                               ( Feel free to add more layers or colours after or before the wool has fused together.)

4.     When the felt is to your liking, scrunch it into a ball and rinse it out, so that there is no soap left in it. Then dry it as best you can by folding it in a tea towel, put it on the floor, and step on it ( My aunt says that this is the best way to get the water out of it) Don't feel confined to just stepping on it though, jump on it, do a jig, or whatever :) .
5.     And voila! You have a lovely felted piece of art! But my project didn't stop there...

Needle Felting

For the tree and the owl on my art piece, I used a technique called needle felting. I took fluffs of wool rovings and used a felting needle to "poke" it into the place and shape that I wanted it in. The felting needle is just like a large sewing needle, but if you look closely you can see tiny hook-like notches near the end of it, which are used to sort of catch the wool and pull it down through the felt/fabric so that it will stay in place. To do this I had to place the art piece on a piece of foam  ( the inside of a pillow or something will work too). When you are done, the art piece will stick to the foam, so you have to pull it off. And there you go, the lovely piece of felt art is complete!

 

 

All the information that I used for this post came from my Aunty Colleen, and my wonderful cousins Mika and Estee, who introduced this type of art to me.

 

Coming soon...

The next art form that I am going to explore is felting: wet felting and needle felting. My Aunty Colleen, who is a wonderful artist, showed me felting when she came to visit this summer, and was lovely enough to leave me some supplies for it. So far I have only made a experiment picture, so I thought that it was high time for me to give it another go.

First, here is some history of felting. Long ago, shepherding nomadic peoples would put soft pieces of wool fluff into their shoes and under the saddles of their horses for warmth and comfort. Later, when they would take the wool out, they realized that it had turned into a sort of cloth. The friction and moisture caused the fibers of the wool fluff to fuse together, and the wool (or felt) could be used for many things, like clothes or tent coverings. It even could be used for art.

I will soon be posting more about this type of art, and hopefully be posting pictures of my own felting pieces.

Getting Started

Hey Everyone!
Well, here is my first official blog post. I decided to ease my way into this project, so I have started with an art form that I am already slighty familiar with: Pen and Ink. All you need to create a pen and ink drawing is thin tipped pens, not unlike fine tipped sharpies. For the first artpiece I did, I mainly used a common type of pen stroke called hatching, or cross hatching. Here is the picture below:


This is a pen and ink drawing on top of watercolour paint. It is based on a picture that I took of a broken window from an old shed on my farm. (Sorry about the bad quality picture, my camera is getting fixed so I had to use my mom's phone). This art piece didn't turn out exactly as I wanted it to. The red paint of the shed walls looks pinkish in contrast to the black pen, and if I did it again I would probably choose a softer green for the view out of the window in the background. But you learn from your mistakes, right? Anyways, this picture was made using hatching. Hatching is the most basic stroke that gives an illusion from a short distance that there are various shades of grey, when really it is all created from fine black lines. The fewer white spots that show, the darker the value appears. Cross hatching is simply hatching in which the lines cross over each other, to give a different look.

The picture above is a quick example of cross hatching. As you can see, the more lines there are, the darker it looks.

I also made another art piece using pen and ink, but this time with a different drawing method.

For this drawing of a leaf, I used a technique called stippling, of which there is an example of below.

Stippling uses tiny dots to create value and shades of grey with black pen. The closer together the dots are, the darker the tone. I was happy with the way the drawing of the leaf turned out, you just need a lot of patience with this technique. One can get tired of dots pretty fast! :)

 

Over all, I really enjoy doing pen and ink. It requires patience possibly a lot of time, depending on the technique you are using. The number 1 rule that I need to remember is DON'T GET LAZY! The lazier I get, the more sloppy I get, and sloppy, messy hatching or stippling does not turn out very well. Unless, of course you are doing a loose kind of pen and ink, which some people can do very well, but I cannot.
So that brings us to the end of this post. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and please feel free to give feedback, make comments, criticize, ask questions (though I probably will not be able to answer most of them :) ) etc. etc. And if you want some more information on pen and ink, I found some very good stuff at http://drawsketch.about.com/library/blinktexture.htm . Well, that's all for now! Till next time, Riley

Hi!

Hello! My name is Riley, and i am a grade 11 student. For Bible class we were told to create a blog that followed us while we did something called a passion project. A passion project is a project that can be about anything we want, and the goal is to learn, make, or accomplish something by the end of the semester.

My passion project is going to be all about artwork. i really enjoy doing art, but i never get around to find time to do it. My goal this semester is to learn to create different types of artwork that i have never tried before, and to get better at the types of art that i already do.

Hopefully this will be an interesting project, so follow me if you want to see me attempt to complete it!