...And Cue Creativity

How long has it been since my last post? Meh, who's counting? But with freshman year at MIT over, I can finally get back to doing art. As much as I love physics and calculus and differential equations, I couldn't wait to get back to being creative. With the left side of my brain ready to tackle all sorts of mathematical and scientific problems, I'm ready to start exercising the skills of the right side (and utilize all the art supplies I got from Blick).

I started off slowly with some practice in lettering. A steady hand and good eye-hand coordination (notice the reversal) are basic necessities for drawing and painting. Since around the beginning of this year, I've been wanting to do some artistic renderings of quotes, famous or otherwise. It's good practice for having good judgment on layout and composition for graphic design projects or other art projects. Keep in mind, these aren't meant to be finished works of art, just practice sketches. Oh and my camera's batteries are dead, so until I can find new ones, the camera on my phone will have to do.

From one of my favorite poems by my favorite poet; "since feeling is first" by ee cummings

Going from design, I went back to traditional drawing. The first picture is just a tonal sketch to practice for the actual piece which will have the local colors. It's my first time using sanguine and bistre (the light and dark browns respectively) and I rather enjoyed using them with the black and white charcoal. The second picture is done with chalk pastels on pastelbord, a surface from Blick. It makes the pastels come out so smoothly and blend nicely, I love it already.

Expect more pastel paintings and quotes later! I might have some more fun with them. 

And everything was done whilst listening to my Piano Guys Radio on Pandora.

Glass Art

I was one of the lucky ones to take the glassblowing class here at MIT over IAP (that's Independent Activities Period). It was super fun and I'm planning on continuing it, probably through making pumpkins for the annual glass pumpkin patch sale. Anyways, here are some pictures of what I made (photo creds for the first 9 to a good friend of mine, Abdi). They are only the ones that actually look nice and that I can actually give away. I have given away a couple though, and I'm hoping to make more pumpkins and such.

Usually, I shy away from 3D art and sculptures. It's difficult for me to get a blob of material and shape something out of it. But I find glass blowing and glass art to be a lot easier since it's very abstract (at least in my point of view).

Natural Paintings

Second semester has started and now I unfortunately don't have as much time to paint anymore. But I did paint quite a bit on my semi-break; I painted mostly nature, flowers, a bird, and a butterfly. I'm testing my abilities with watercolor and oils, and so far, I'm liking it. I find watercolors to be loose and easy to use but they tend to test my patience a little; it seems to take so long for it to dry. Oils actually do take forever to dry, and whenever I want to put a new layer on, the new layer just blends with the old one. It can be pretty frustrating.

But regardless, I loved being able to paint after so long of not doing much of it. Photo creds to a good friend of mine, Abdi.

The flowers are in watercolor and the butterfly in oils. I might end up making a series of watercolor flowers at some point.

And remember this pen and ink drawing? It was from a previous post and I promised to do a bigger, colored version later on. Well I did, actually a while ago. I just never got the chance to take a picture of it.

Digital Art

Happy New Year! Sure I'm a couple of days late but, oh well.

I'm finally back on campus after spending about three weeks at home. It was fun and relaxing and I finally had some time to do art, more specifically, digital art. I bought a Wacom intuos5 tablet a while back and I haven't used it in a while (mostly because I have no time and because it's a very expensive tablet that I didn't want to bring with me to college). When I got home, I just had a sudden urge to do digital art. It's easy (-ish) and you can use the much desired "undo" button. Seriously, if that were and actual button on my computer, it would probably be broken since I can be very particular about things.

But I had fun drawing on my computer. I drew one portrait but I edited it a little with different colors arranged in a triptych. I might do another version of it later on or draw another portrait when I go back home. I also drew lips since no matter how I draw them, there always seems to be something wrong with them. So I practiced a little bit.

Let's Go Back

So my dad was trying to find something on one of his many flash drives and he was trying to lead me to a certain file...all via phone. Long story short, I found it, we were both happy, yay.

But I noticed that the flash drive that I found the file on was one of the back ups that we used when we were switching from our PC to our Mac. I went under my file (they were named according to my family) and proceeded to scroll through everything that my 13-year-old self deemed worthy to keep essentially forever. The pictures I'm going to post require a little bit of explanation though.

I was one of those kids that was super-obsessed with Neopets and coding (I know, they go together wonderfully!). I actually redid my gallery and profile to whatever I wanted because I knew CSS and HTML. Now if you're gonna edit your profile or gallery, you can't just change the background image or scroll bar color or cursor. You've got to have some pretty awesome graphics. So I made animated GIFs not only for my Neopets profile but for my websites as well (yes I was also making my own websites that never got published thank goodness). And for your viewing pleasure...

The backgrounds were originally transparent so pardon the red.

I was also pretty obsessed with drawing manga, not so much with watching anime though. So in elementary school, I drew these two pictures in colored pencils for an art exhibit (or whatever you call an exhibit in elementary school).

Mixing two obsessions together!

So that's what I did when I was younger. Just in case I ever forget how I started with art, I will now have these to forever remind me.