My Past Art Projects: Rated — Part 2

The biggest self-critic strikes again.

If you haven’t already seen my part one, I am exposing my past art projects, rating them 1 through 10, and explaining what I like or dislike about them.

Without further ado, let’s get rating.

#1: Out of the Looking Glass (Box)?

This was a project that I created for an assignment in my Intro to Printmaking class. The assignment was to take inspiration from Alice in Wonderland and create a print that belied a deeper meaning. I sketched out a screencap from the movie just using pencil on standard sketchbook paper first, including shading and texture. The final print was made using black ink on standard printer paper through transfer from carved linoleum. Let me just say, linoleum is very tough to carve, especially for a first timer, like I was. I chose to work with negative space in order to show that Alice was quite literally growing out of the box. However, this meant that I would have to carve out all of the linoleum outside the borders of the box so that those parts would not pick up any ink. As you can see below, I missed many little parts of the linoleum that ended up picking up ink where it wasn’t supposed to. However, I had already invested many many hours carving linoleum, and at some point I resolved that it would not be the end of the world to have ink transfer.

My biggest issues with it stem from the little bits of ink transfer in the white space surrounding the box; the fact that from the print, one may not be able to tell that it is from Alice in Wonderland; and the sloppy perspective work that I never fixed. In simpler words, it’s messy, not necessarily recognizable, and the middle section of the house looks questionable. That said, I’m actually very proud of this print; I think that it is striking due to the negative space.

Rating: 8/10

#2: Skier? I hardly know her!

Pardon the bad joke.

This piece was made for my mom’s birthday card a couple years ago because she loves skiing, and I wanted to reference that. I originally wanted to paint a night skiing scene, but that was a bit over my head in terms of skill. Therefore, I settled on a simple (daylight) skiing scene made using watercolor on watercolor paper.

I actually think that the skier is tolerable because you can obviously tell what they are doing and what they are wearing. I don’t mind some of the trees, and the sky is not bad either. The mountains and the trees’ shadows however, get a bit dicey. I think that I over-defined some of the mountain peaks, and under-defined the trees’ shadows. I tried to shade a bit of the snow at the bottom to provide depth, but it still looks like the skier is levitating, so I deem that unsuccessful as well.

Obviously, watercolor is not my strong suit, so there’s plenty of room for improvement. Thankfully, I gave it to one of the only people who would appreciate it anyway.

Rating: 4.5/10

#3: Someone hire me to be Genovia’s royal painter stat!

I’m hoping everyone understands that joke. But anyway: this piece was made just for fun, using acrylic paint on canvas. My favorite fruit is actually pear, so I decided to try painting a still life just to see if I could. Dare I say, I achieved it?

I believe I painted it over a couple of days because I had to let the background dry before I could paint the subject over it. I think that I captured the light source, highlights, and the shadows of the pear pretty well. There is a slight smudge of green on the bottom right side of the pear that was unintentional, but as is a trend with my art projects, eventually I don’t care about small imperfections because at that point I’d like to be done with the piece. The shadow underneath the pear is also a bit sloppy in my opinion as well; it is pretty much one value, and you can see the texture of the canvas so much that it looks like an afterthought (spoiler alert: it was). However, it’s very obviously a pear. It looks pretty real in my opinion, and for my first time painting fruit still life, I think that I executed a piece that is a great foundation for future still life pieces.

Rating: 7/10

I hope that was entertaining even though this post was a bit more positive than the last one — feel free to give your thoughts or advice if you have expertise or just thoughts!

(A very nice commenter on part one suggested that I identify specific areas of my pieces that I could work on improving, and go from there instead of simply rating the projects. That is definitely good advice, thank you! Unfortunately, I find simply rating my projects funny. Therefore, I have resolved to rate the pieces on Medium, and enact the advice offline. :D)

Final part to come soon! Whether you want it or not!