Art Blast 04/10/2011

Oh, did I have fun today! It was a mad dash scramble trying to complete all of my weekly goals that I hadn’t finished yet — which was most of them — so I got to do science and sculpting and make my first ever stop-motion film. Thoroughly enjoyed myself! I’m not going to be able to meet my goal of painting a miniature this week because the paints we got are, uh, less than stellar, so we need to track down better ones first. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that until Chad sat down to work on a mini this afternoon. Well, that’s what you get for waiting until the last minute. I’ll try to do better next week.

Other than that, though, I did pretty good at meeting my goals this week. I’ve got about 20 pages to go in the Bradbury book, but I’ll finish that before I call it a night. I also need to sketch something today, but that should be do-able, too. The first day after my declaration that I was going to stop slacking off, I only got a sketch done. But after that, I met all of my daily goals every day except yesterday, when I got home later than I expected so I was too beat to sketch or practice penmanship. I did get lots of writing done yesterday, though — some work on a sonnet, finished a scene in the short story, and even did a blog post. So I’m happy. Writing is always priority one for me.

The goals really seem to be helping me get stuff done. I feel guilty if I haven’t met them, so days when I’d normally let myself slide (“It’s late. We were so busy with other stuff today. I’ll do better tomorrow. Yada yada yada…”), I knuckled under and got stuff done. Huzzah for that!

As promised, though, a blog post full of art:

Origami Whale

This week’s origami was a whale. His nearly twin brother was also the star of the stop motion film Chad and I worked on today. I still need to splice all the individual pictures into a movie, but I’ll try to get that uploaded next week so you can see how it turned out. We “previewed” it by quickly scrolling through the pics on the camera, and it’s pretty cool. Well, I think it is, at least. 😉

Twig and Petals (photo)

Twig and Petals (sketch)

I had a hard time deciding which sketch to post this week. There were three I really liked. In the end, I picked this one because I liked how the leaves and berries turned out. I took the photo version with my iPhone, with the zoom all the way up, and I think it looks pretty cool, too, like an impressionist painting.

Pensive Earth Golem

Sculpting almost didn’t happen because the first package of Sculpey we opened had dried out. Luckily we had two other packs. I made a primitive Earth golem to decorate one of my bonsais. I had a bit of Sculpey left when I was done, so I made a plinth for him to sit on, too. It’s a separate piece, so I can take him off it if I want.

Creepy Golem

The lighting in this picture makes him look pretty creepy. He reminds me of a Cthulhu mythos monster, but I can’t remember which one.

The King's Court

I didn’t get a chance to work on a new 3D image this week. I’d planned to, but the day I sat down at the computer to work on one, I ended up tinkering with websites instead. And mouse-potatoing for far too long. Which reminded me why I started leaving my computer off most days in the first place. Anyway, The King’s Court is the most recent image I’ve done, created in Carrara 8. I’ve actually got older ones that are better. I haven’t done much 3D in the past couple of years, just a few pieces here and there, and my rustiness shows. Hopefully I’ll get back up to par again soon.

Facing Front

This is one of my favorite photographs from our trip to Manteo. I took this outside the aquarium there. I love how the one fish is looking straight on into the camera while the others fan out swimming around him. I also love how much better the image quality is with my new DSLR instead of my very old 6.1 MP mostly point-and-shoot digital camera.

So, that’s it for this week’s art blast. I hope you enjoyed it, and I’ll have more stuff for you next week!