Choose 1 project of yours and critique it. What would you change?
I was lucky enough to be randomly chosen as one of the three students to answer this specific question along with, coincidentally, the only two other students in the class who are going to AP art next year. What are the chances? Less than 1 in 17500, but I digress.
This piece is a replica of Arizona's Montezuma castle. It is made of adobe, which is both a unique medium in sculpture and is one of the materials the Sinagua (the tribe who built the real castle) used to build most of their structures. The chalk pastels were a wise addition that makes the whole design less flat looking. The most preventable mistake I made in this class, however, was in this project: the proportions are messed up. This is probably because I was looking at a mostly redundant sketch I made rather than a photograph, and the distortion of the proportion multiplied each time I recreated the castle. Also, If I was to make this a second time, I would have used a thicker brick of adobe so I could have carved deeper into it without fear of breaking through the other side, and perhaps recreate the rotundity of the original castle while I'm at it.
This piece is a replica of Arizona's Montezuma castle. It is made of adobe, which is both a unique medium in sculpture and is one of the materials the Sinagua (the tribe who built the real castle) used to build most of their structures. The chalk pastels were a wise addition that makes the whole design less flat looking. The most preventable mistake I made in this class, however, was in this project: the proportions are messed up. This is probably because I was looking at a mostly redundant sketch I made rather than a photograph, and the distortion of the proportion multiplied each time I recreated the castle. Also, If I was to make this a second time, I would have used a thicker brick of adobe so I could have carved deeper into it without fear of breaking through the other side, and perhaps recreate the rotundity of the original castle while I'm at it.
Choose 1 piece of art that you used skills and techniques learned from previous projects. Discuss your growth as an artist and how you incorporated these skills and techniques to create the piece.
If there was one thing I learned in this class it was that pouring hot glue all over the place solves everything. I first experienced the miracle of hot glue in the class's first big project: man & nature. My wind turbine was having difficulties holding itself up, so I added some wire to the back of the structure. More importantly, however, I secured it using an amount of hot glue equal to 20 times the weight of the wire. Later on, I used the "slather things with hot glue" technique in my vessel project to stick the walls of the structure together. Now I plan on exhausting the world's supply of hot glue sticks solely for the purpose of creating excessively structurally stable art.
- Which project was your most successful? Describe the theme and or topic and the process you went through to complete the project.
Firmly nestled in my list of the top five coolest things I've ever made, and regally sat atop the list of coolest things I've made in sculpture class, is this samurai. I would even go so far as to say this is the best plastic-utensil-armor samurai I've ever seen. The objective of this project was to create something sculptural out of $3 or less of materials. Naturally, I was compelled to steal a plethora of utensils from the school cafeteria and hot glue them into the shape of a samurai. I made the body around a wire skeleton, enrobed it with stolen napkins, and gave it a nice pose that would strike fear into the hearts of its enemies. Then, armed with the knowledge of what samurai armor looks like after ten minutes of research on google images, I donned the samurai with armor forged from chopped up pieces of contraband plastic utensils. Afterwards, I noticed the samurai was having difficulty standing up so I nailed its feet to a plank of wood, which should teach it not to disgrace I, its feudal lord, again.
- Pick any warm-up from your sketchbook that you found beneficial, interesting or simply felt you handled well. Describe the activity and reason for selecting it above the others. Include photo.
This is the project I planned out most in my sketchbook. When I started the project, I realized I had no actual idea what an elephant's head looked like. In my mind, an elephant's head was a rectangle with a tube coming out of it. I remedied my elephantine ignorance by drawing an elephant's head. Honestly, this whole section is just for me showing of my elephant head drawings. I also planned out all the symbols on the elephant, what they meant, etc. But that's less important.
Medium: which medium did you most enjoy working with and why? Include photo.
Despite my best efforts trying to find anything related to carving adobe on google, nothing came forth. I am therefore convinced that I am the first person in the modern world to have carved adobe into an image. And for something I thought would be difficult, it turned out to be deceivingly simple. I was pretty much just digging very organized holes in a patch of mud.