An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.

The Final: Found objects sculpture, themes of puns and proverbs. 

My chosen proverb was "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." It was a general statement on unhealthy consumption of food and drinks. I rarely eat apples, but I drink Dr. Pepper on a daily basis.  

I created an apple out of Dr. Pepper cardboard boxes, and a label here and there. The stem was a straw, and the leaf was the 23 flavors logo. I decided to take a slice out of my apple to make it look more like an apple and less like a soccer ball. I also used the little pop tabs for seeds. 

This project refined my cardboard sculpture skills, and helped me to think more conceptually. This project, while super time consuming, was not too difficult. Once I got the idea, I could picture the end result clearly, and just worked toward that image. It turned out the way I pictured, and I am really happy with the end product. 

A This Kidney Is

This is, yet again, a collage based off of my kidney sculpture. It's a text based collage, and I basically outlined the shape of my kidney piece, and filled it with words. The kidney body is filled with a scrambled anatomical definition of a kidney, and is colored in the two oranges I used to color that section of my kidney sculpture. The artery, vein, and ureter are filled with their own scrambled definitions, and in colors respective to their function, as they were in my sculpture piece.  The background is filled with scrambled words of things that surround or are involved with the kidney in the body.I scrambled the words because I didn't feel it was necessary to be able to read them in a coherent sentence.

In general, I thought my piece turned out well, I may have considered choosing a different color for the background, perhaps a lighter green, but other than that I am pretty satisfied with it. 

Beans

Photoshop collage about and involving my internal body part sculpture. 

My body part sculpture was a kidney. Hence, Kidney bean background. Kidney's filter out wastes; coffee filter and waste basket. The tubes are from my actual sculpture. 

I really disliked using Photoshop. It was slow and complicated, at least for me. I've never used it before, and even though we had a brief tutorial on it, I just wasn't used to it. I didn't know how to use all the tools, and kept forgetting about the different layers... It took me way longer than it should've to complete, and I was very frustrated with it.  

"Beneath the makeup and behind the smile, I am just a girl who wishes for the world."

Three stage collage project. 

Stage one: geometric shapes and black and white imagery. I started this project by making triangles and squares out of classic black and white pictures of Marilyn Monroe, and black and white cut outs. 

Stage two: add organic shapes. I added cut out pictures of Marilyn before she was Marilyn. They're from her first photo-shoot, when she was still Norma Jean.

Stage three: add elements of color. I added a quote in color, with certain words highlighted, and images to match the highlighted words. This, for me, completed the piece nicely, showing that while Marilyn had changed so much, and had become a huge star, underneath it all, she was still Norma Jean. 

The Tea Party

Midterm Project. 

I had to create a piece "in the style of" the artists assigned to me for my research paper and presentation. My artists were Judy Chicago, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Nancy Spero. These three artists' styles are very diverse. They are connected by their feminist beliefs. I struggled at first, trying to figure out how to turn this common belief into a piece. I finally decided to connect my artists in the same way that Chicago connected influential women in her Dinner Party; by creating a place setting for each artist and putting them into the shape of a triangular table. I made a place setting for each woman: the natural flower for O'Keeffe, the circular flower-like one for Chicago's early work, and the text and image section is like Spero's unusual, outspoken work. The hardest part for me was coming up with the idea for my piece. Once I had my concept, planning and executing it was much easier. 

Orange You Glad I Didn't Say "Banana"

This is an orange. Or at least part of one. The assignment was to create the inside of a natural object using cardboard and hot glue. And it was timed. So this is the inside of an orange: the middle bit, the covering around a section, a little seed thing, and a bunch of those messy strings. (You can't really see the hot glue strings, but they're there.) This project was interesting and difficult because I had to create a not typical, incomplete part of something. I had to look at just certain aspects of the orange, and ignore the rest. That wasn't easy for me at first; I found myself wanted to make the whole orange, or a whole section, but after I starting working on it, it got easier to focus on the smaller pieces. 

When I finished, I felt that I had successfully recreated bits of an orange. Although I, and others, noticed it did look a bit like a banana opened lengthwise. Why my orange-inspired pieces always turn out to look like other fruits, I do not know. 

Where Oh Where Has This Kidney Been?

Our assignment for this project was to choose an internal body part, and create a much larger sculpture of it using cardboard and hot glue, and then add color to it. I chose to create a kidney. 

Before I could start the final sculpture, I had to create a small model in paper. This was more complicated than I originally thought. I started by making different strips that came from the opening, which a tube of paper with one open end, around the back, and back to the opening. This was not a successful method, so I started over. I took a piece of paper, cut a hole in the middle, and then created strips from that center that wrapped around to the back of the tube. This was complicated, but worked better than the previous method. 

Once I finished the paper model, I began work on the large cardboard sculpture. I started by trying to replicate the paper model, but that did not work. The cardboard wouldn't bend and shape the way I wanted it to. So I reverted back to my original idea. I made a large central tube with one open end, and added strips that connected to the opening on both ends, wrapping around the back and connecting to each other. I had to make smaller tubes around main one to prevent the sides form collapsing. This worked very well; my kidney was holding its form and standing on it's base, directly under the opening, as this was the strongest and most stable part of the sculpture. From that opening I inserted three tubes to represent the urethra, artery, and vein. 

I colored my kidney in pastels. The three tubes were colored due to their function; the urethra yellow, the artery red, and the vein blue. The kidney itself I colored in various shades of orange, starting at the top with a light orange, then a red-orange, followed by a maroon-orange color. I sort of shaded my kidney with color. 

While this project was frustrating and time consuming, I learned a lot. I discovered that paper and cardboard and very different, and do not behave in the same way; that colors can shade, in a way; that sometimes a base is structured for you; that the end result will not always follow the model; and that pastels are even messier than I had originally thought. All in all, it was just more learning experience.