I felt like this was a pretty good semester in terms of work created. I really enjoyed getting into a new direction of art work and can see myself continuing down the path I've chosen for future pieces and sets. I think I have finally fount something that really interests me in terms of producing work, and I want to explore what I've started delving into further. The feedback from my professors, peers, and interviewees has showed me what others enjoy, as well as what I've come to like about my own work. While I have a lot of things to do this summer in terms of finding a starting point in my career, learning programming languages, and adjusting to the real world, I'm glad to say that a consistent production of art work is also on my big list of things to do. I'm starting to find a niche in what I want to create, as well as what others would like to see, and I think at this point I should start elaborating on those ideas. I was very happy with the turnout and reception of the senior show, and I can't wait to try and submit more artwork to other locales to try and do it again.

Last Friday I was privileged enough to go to 78th St. Studios for the afternoon and get to see all the wonderful studios and artists inside. At first glance I was taken aback at how crude the building looked from the outside, even the halls to the gallery were giving me second thoughts about how excited I was, but everything proved just fine once we got into the wings and all the studios inside them. Seth, Sarah and I examined countless works of art throughout the floors of the building and enjoyed quite a few conversations with the artists and gallery managers. Of course some studios were more interesting than others; I wasn't too concerned with the artists producing jewelry or cheeses, but some of the traditional artists were fantastic. One man was dedicated to the craft of designing scenes with charcoal to give the impression that they were actually created with oil paints. I particularly liked how he left the pieces floating between two sheets of glass because he created his own natural borders in the piece for the scene to rest in. Some of the artists were quite talkative and enjoyed our company, though others seemed to shun us for how young we were. The group quickly learned not to take any pictures of any present artist's work or they generally got upset, but it was pretty funny the first few times. I was really astonished to see a whole set of work from a student who went to my high school with mine the halls of the second floor. I noticed the name, recognized the work, and then confirmed it through his facebook and personal page, it was pretty neat to see. I'd like to go to this event again sometime in the future, and even have stuff displayed here at some point if possible, but it was well worth the time to go!


As far as getting feedback from people this semester, I think my classmates as well as my professors do a pretty good job of reminding me what I should be trying to display in my own works. They help me to understand what ideas and motives I want to push throughout my work and are quick to point out flaws and errors when they can. I think it is best to have people critique your art when they know nothing of the subject at hand, that way it forces you to pick apart your objectives and themes throughout a body and break them down in simplest terms. In contrast, I think having to spar your words with something who is a bit more versed in the subject can really strengthen your arguments as well.

Hello world!

I was very happy with the turn out at the show last weekend, I was even so fortunate enough to sell a piece to one of my friends! Everybody worked hard to put on a great night and I think that it showed by how well everything was displayed and how well received it was.

Last week I also got a chance to interview my friend Mayim's mother, Civia Weisner, who is an independent and commission based artist who specializes fountain pen ink art and calligraphy! Talk about cool, she always sends me a birthday card with a small drawing and a personal message written in her perfect handwriting. While the greater portion of work she does nowadays is for her calligraphy, she used to do some great drawings and graphic designs back in the 80's and 90's. So we got to talk about her past work and where my own work was headed and how we each do our processes. It was a good time and a good opportunity to go home and see my family as well since she lives just down the road.

This Friday I'm also going on my second artistic adventure to the 78th St. Studios gallery showing with the AU art club. I can't wait because I had never even heard about it until last week, and now I'm really intrigued to see how large and crazy this place is.

Now this was the second time I'd gotten to go to the Cleveland State University Student Show, and it was even better than when I went on a whim with my friends three years ago. I went during the second week since opening so there weren't too many people hanging out in the gallery with me, but I was also there in the middle of the day on a beautiful Sunday in April so maybe most people just had better things to do. Anyways.... it was still pretty awesome. It was actually far smaller than our own student show in terms of quantity, but I think that the average quality and professionalism of work in the pieces presented was a bit higher than what the Ashland student show permits. And even though they only had around 50 or 60 pieces, some of them were just simply masterful and innovative.  Judging by the pieces presented, they seem to focus on drawing and 2D design more so than our own college, especially because there were a quite a few impressive inked drawings, in color as well as b&w. I think there's just something in an urban environment that kind of peaks people's artistic interests and gets them to try crazy or newer things compared to the more classic approach thats seems to be presented at Ashland. When I took my drawing I course at CSU a few years back, I had a lot of fun just learning from the two professors that taught the class. They would share stories of their commissions and gallery showings that just seemed so extravagant compared to anything I've ever had the chance to experience so far, and I think that if I do manage to become a successful commercial artist, or some type of artist at least, that an urban environment with my more clientele and more artistic influences would be the type of place to settle down in.

Pieces for final approval

I was thinking that I wanted to add more content to my pieces and as I looked back through my old "Adobe" folder on my desktop I found an old piece of a gyroscope I did years ago in my free time. I knew I was going to put this in one of my pieces because I liked the shape and the revolving pieces so much, how they intertwined and flowed. But the complex shape reminded me of old alchemy circles, which I thought could be a great addition to my pieces, giving an ethereal and surreal presence to each work. I started researching them online and decided to make my own circles for each piece and add a few relevant traditional symbols to each one as well. For instance, my bird figure has an "air" symbol, the turtle has "sulfur" and "water", the snake has "iron" (for his sword), and the cat has a symbol for "boron" mostly because I took a liking to the symbol, and it resembles a cat's eye. One more piece is on the way, but I thought I'd get this up here

I think I've been stemming ideas from a lot of fantasy and sci-fi movies and video games for much of my work. I really do push to try and make my work look more towards a comic book or graphic pen approach. I like to have high contrast black and white images with partial grays in between, but its by no means a skill I've mastered in drawing yet. I also like to browse small time artist collectives such as Deviantart, they have great groups and categories for brainstorming and getting a good idea of what I might want my own pieces to look like. Below is a picture of one of my favorite Deviantartists, Prog Wang who does mech warriors, androids, and all kinds of futuristic stuff. I'm obviously not as advanced in technique as he, but I really enjoy his approach in creating from scratch and the constant build of colors he uses. I think DaVinci's concept drawings and sketchings are really more of what I relate to the most similarly because I enjoy the idea of trying to figure things out for the first time. He went out and studied things he didn't understand, that no one really understood at the time and went about trying to teach himself why and how things worked. I believe that if I can achieve a similar approach then people will start to see how my own creations would work. When doing his study drawings, he had a habit of drawing only portions of the body that interested him at the time or would refrain from drawing a mirrored half of the body such as doing only part of a ribcage, or one leg. I think I need to adopt something like this for my own work, partially completed pieces of my robots and possibly the rotation of joints or appendages to show their range of motion.

comic book effect I enjoy

I haven't yet scanned my newest piece because I need to use one of the large scale copy machines with a larger scanning bed, but it is a representation of the famous Icarus of Greek mythology. In my own piece, Icarus is composed mainly of metallic wings and appendages and bursting through a sheet of glass while being slightly silhouetted by a large spherical sun directly behind him. The sun is meant to juxtapose the ancient myth since this robot's wings will not melt at a similar height. I have also tried to fashion the figure with a similar physique of strength and conditioning as Icarus is often displayed with to show the natural beauty of the form. This piece is meant to capture another step towards advanced technology as I present my creation with the adoption of flight instead of just pure agility and reflexes. I think that with a good amount of digital painting that this piece shows promise to be my favorite.

 With each piece I would like to try and highlight a certain ability or strength within my creation; for instance, my first robot demonstrates great speed, the next shows agility, and this one flight. For my next two or three I am considering brute strength for my next piece (albeit robots today tend to exhibit strength quite well so this will have to be exaggerated), but other than I am stumped on what I should do for my final one or two. I'm thinking enhanced sight or hearing would be neat but difficult to display, another option is some type of futuristic matter manipulation like telekinesis or pyrokineses. I don't know, I'm sure it will be pretty cool though.

In this piece I wanted to demonstrate not only the physical prowess of my creations but also the light footed agility that they may possess someday as well. While it is rough at the moment, I will be trying to show my robot in an acrobatic feat of sliding through a field of lasers unharmed. Catherine Zeta Jones has got nothing on these animatrons.

Today we had a pretty nice critique that led me to really voice what I'd like to show in my body this semester. I would like to give off the impression that I am creating a journal or a collection of concept robots and inventions of the future, yet set in a rougher, more old fashioned period. The subjects should look rustic or pre modern in terms of current technology but set the scene for a similar age, even though the technology is far more advanced for the time period. For instance, this would be similar to looking at blueprints and concept sketches from 150 years ago but of technology that is not even available to us today. I will show my creations doing things we wouldn't think possible in terms of today's possibilities. I also want to bring a sense of fantasy to the viewer by placing the robots in crazy situations or surrounding them with unfamiliar or antique objects. I'd like to have the viewer think they were examining the lost pages of some unknown inventor from centuries ago, or that they were stumbling upon the musings of an engineer. The sense of fantasy is important to me because the things I will be presenting will be so odd and so unachievable by today's standards, yet shown in an exaggerated form.

Along with showing the design process of robots, one of the things I want to try and accomplish with this series is to show them with seemingly exaggerated technical prowess. To us this may seem like an impossible feat in any machine today, but it could possibly happen at some point. We have no idea what kind of advancements the future holds for us in the next century. We could have never have imagined what we have as our most modern conveniences today a century ago, let alone longer than that, so who knows what lays ahead. But I enjoy the dramatic, hopeful exaggeration because I want it to seem crazy at the time. Commoners would have thought Da Vinci to be crazy for trying to build flying machines during his time, and the case isn't too much different now.

Scans of a couple of the drawings I've done for my base images. For whatever reason with the mode changing between grayscale and RGB 8b, they don't save color and levels properly, so they are a bit light

I still need to work a bunch out on this, but I'm getting closer to what I want

I've started to scan my drawn portions of my work and begin adding digital layers. For my pieces I would like to give a presence of blueprinting and rough drafts in order to relate to the process of improvement and development. At this point, I may decide to exclude architecture all together altogether and just design robots and animatrons of different eras or concepts. What I think would be a cool thing to do at this point is keep a base image and develop it different every time I start a piece, sort of like a template. This way I could give the impression of expansion and tweaking over time as my ideas change. My robot may change angles, proportions, size, and general physical composure over its development process. 

fill

With more practice in drawing my robotic models for my work, I've developed better ideas on what I want to accomplish for the semester. I'd like to explore my own desire to create from scratch and improve on my drawing skills while incorporating all my work to digital scans. The development process will be important because I want to give off the idea of creation and drafting, much like the collected works of Da Vinci. He gives a sense of tinkering with the ideas from his head and showing sketches of incomplete but well thought out ideas. I want to relate my work to his since my creations are well thought out for concepted figures, however, they're probably impossible to create at this time, much like many of Da Vinci's inventions.