Senior Exhibit

The Senior Exhibit is opening this Thursday at my school. This is what I submitted.

I've done a bunch like this over the past few months. I'm not sure how much I really like them.

Illustration II : Project 1

I'm taking Illustration II over the summer. It's with the same teacher I had for Illustration I and some of the projects seem a little similar, he likes things a certain way, I guess.

Here's the first thing I did. I worked on coming up with the idea while I was on my recent trip to Las Vegas with my friends, hence the subject. The assignment was to illustrate a metaphor.


Cat and Mouse Game
18" x 24"
Acrylic on Canvas

~Adam

Painting II Recap : Part 5

Here's a few self portrait Alla Primas I did while in this class.

13.5" x 9.5"
oil on paper

13.5" x 9.5"
oil on paper

~Adam

Painting II Recap : Part 4

Ah, abstract painting. That good ol' excuse for not knowing what the hell you're doing. Well, this time I had to plan exactly how I was going to do whatever the hell I didn't know what I was going to do... right. And here she is :


36" x 36"
oil on canvas

Well, I had a lot of fun doing this actually. I just a bunch of different techniques and the exploration was kind of neat. This painting got the best grade out of the 4 I did for the class, so I guess that means it's pretty good? Who am I to judge?

And here we have the not-so-abstract. If you hadn't guessed already, I'm an old-school nerd. This is one of my favorite paintings so far.


13.5" x 9.5"
oil on paper

~Adam

Painting II Recap : Part 3

I've found that figures are the subject I have the most trouble with. These are a couple paintings I did that I struggled with. The first was done in painting class with model. It looked really bad after the first two sessions but I made some drastic changes near the end and sort of recovered it. I was happy with the direction it was moving, but overall it was probably one of the worst in the class.


30" x 26"
oil on canvas

This is a painting of the Death of Iphitus done for my Digital Art class. I did the painting originally in oil, then photographed and digitally enhanced it, you can see before and after shots here.


18" x 24"
oil on canvas


Digital

~Adam

Painting II Recap : Part 2

Here are a couple more of the alla prima practice paintings I did early in the semester. The one's with shoes and pastries did not end up all that great, especially the pastries. Everything was too similar in color and I had a hard time defining where they each object began and ended. But it's all just practice and I learned a bit from doing it. I did however make a conscious attempt to apply the paint more heavily and succeeded on that front.


Vegetables
13.5" x 9.5"
oil on paper


Baked Goods
13.5"x9.5"
oil on paper


Women's Shoes
13.5"x9.5"
oil on paper

~Adam

Painting II Recap : Part 1

Well, I've done a ton of work over the past semester and have been mostly too busy to post any of it here, as you may have noticed by the lack of posts. So over the next few weeks I'm going to try to post more frequently with current work as well as the work I did while in school.

Here's the first painting I did. A still life of an apple and banana sitting in a bucket, and that's an egg over on the left edge. I thought it turned out fairly well, but my teacher only gave me a 'B'. He said I needed to apply the paint thicker.

18"x24"
oil on canvas

While we're on the topic of fruit I figured I'd post this fruit bowl alla prima again. (this photo is a little better) We did these paintings once a week as practice during the first half of the semester.

13.5"x9.5
oil on paper

~Adam

A Staple Portfolio Piece

This is the first of many practice paintings I'll be doing this semester for my Painting II course. It's a very different style than I usually do, I'll be working on using this style even better, it's fun, and best of all, quick.


Fruit Bowl
11x15
Oil on Paper

~Adam

All the Cool Kids are Doing it

Yep... school is back. Sorry I've been busy and haven't gotten a post up here in over a week. So I'll post a double today.

This is the final piece I did for my Illustration class over the winter mini-mester. The assignment was to compare an inside and outside view. I know I'm not exactly the most talented artist, but I hope I'm proficient enough that you can figure out what is show in the right side of this painting without me telling. (hint: it's not a "cars race")

Church and Factory
16x20
Acrylic on Canvas

~Adam

Surrealism

I've liked surrealism for longer than I've "formally liked art", and it is a style that has probably played a major part in getting to me where I am currently as an artist. (whether that's good or not is up for debate)

Anyhow, It was kind of a big deal for me to do my first piece of surrealism. It may bring to mind a particular painting by Rene Magritte, but I swear I came up with the idea before seeing that piece. I feel like my lack of skill with the medium had some slight negative effect on the outcome, but I put a lot of time into it and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

16 x 20"
Acrylic on Canvas

~Adam

Townscape Painting

Here's my latest painting done for my Illustration I class. The notable points are the limited colors, only orange, black, and white, and the use of the Golden Ratio.

16" x 20"
acrylic on canvas

Here's a detail of the cathedral half way through.

~Adam

A Peaceful Scene

I did a painting of a temple on a mountain much like the drawings I posted here and here. I felt it was appropriate for this week's Illustration Friday topic, "peace".

Temple on the Mountain
11"x14"
oil on canvas board

~Adam

Finished Triptych

Well it's been several weeks, but I've finally finished up the triptych that I posted sketches for a while ago.

I started off as I do with most paintings, drawing right onto the canvas. For this project I used canvas boards, mostly because they're cheaper.


I began painting right over my drawings here. I tried to go back and forth between each piece so they would all develop at about the same rate and keep some of the same colors.


Here they are with all the major elements.

And finally after I added details, this is what I ended up with.


The piece has a theme of confusion and being lost in life, which is a very serious idea and thought it would be interesting to put that against a cartoony, light-hearted style, adding more to the confusing feeling of the work. Obviously the crossroads piece holds it all together and most clearly relates that theme. The city piece is meant to give a busy and overcrowded kind of feeling. The buildings can't even fit into thier own area. And finally the home is supposed to be the most peaceful of the scenes, yet nothing is perfect, hence it has the darkest sky, a more subtle discomfort.

I also had the idea of making a larger series of paintings with this structure (you may notice the edges of each are nearly identical) that could be placed and rearanged in any order, giving it the ability to take on varying stories and themes dependant on the configuration. We'll see...

~Adam

Triptych Sketches

My next painting is going to be a triptych on canvas board. I got the idea as I was driving home from a friend's last night and had to put down some sketches at around 3am. Here's what I have so far. The fish in the sky for the second panel were ideas for my Captain Hal's logo, obviously they won't be in the painting :)






I started working today, hopefully I'll have something I'm happy with in a few weeks.

~Adam

Liberty

I recently went on a daytrip with my family to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was a good time, and educational. The buildings on Ellis Island looked awsome, but we were moving around to much for me to be able to take the time to sketch them. Anyway, I decided to use one of the photos I had take as a background for my next painting. It was taken from the top of the Statye of Liberty's pedestal. We could only get so many tickets to go up there, and Anne, unfortunately, was not one of the few that could go up. But this is basically what I thought would be a cool tourist-y photo.

You can see my references taped to the mirror in the first shot, the pose is from a photo of the two of us on a cruise we took a couple years ago. Though I'm only using that for the layout, I am painting the faces from life, hence the mirror, and I had Anne pose while I worked on hers. Obviously I've again shown some of the progression as I've worked on it. I like seeing it, so I'm going to continue doing it.



I've been working on this on and off for the past week but I really need to get started on my final project so I'm going to put this aside for now, hopefully I'll get back to it and finish it soon.

~Adam

Addiction Problem

It's been too long. I'm sorry. I've been.... distracted. Thanks Lorey for trying to kick me into gear. I'll do my best to keep the posting up.

My most recent painting is my first self portrait with the medium. It was fun and interesting. I'm growing to like painting more and more. I took several pictures throughout the process so you can see how it came along. Maybe nobody else cares, but I always enjoy seeing other artist's work that way. I'm not going to describe each one, just check them out yourself. (Color differences are due to poor lighting, sorry).






~Adam

On a side note, I just finished reading David Mack's Kabuki Volume 2. It has some great visiuals and recomend checking out his website.)

Peter Paul Rubens - The Straw Hat

Well, It wasn't fun the first time, and it wasn't fun the second time. But at least I think it turned out a little better looking. My adaptation of Ruben's The Straw Hat.

Here's what I did in the first night. I didn't get much detail in the face yet.

And here's how it looked after the next day, pretty much finished.

A week later I painted a black border around it to cover up my guidelines. I need to redo that better I think.

Hopefully I'll be done with the old masters for a while now.
~Adam

A Renaissance Master, I am Not

No, I can't really compare to Tiziano Vecelli, (aka. Titian) but I was asked to try anyway. My assignment this week for my painting class was to choose a renaissance painting and copy it. I chose The Penitent Magdalene, for some reason I thought it might be one of the easier options. "Easy" being relative, the Italian Renaissance is when just about every one of the well known masters of painting was active, including all the Ninja Turtles :)

I spent about 5 hours working on it between two days. Titian of course probably spent months working on it. But anyway here's what I ended up with.


Trying to redo someone else's work is not my idea of fun. I think the best part of my version is the "happy little tree" at top right. Hopefully this is the last time I need to do this.

~Adam

I've Been Lazy

I painted this a week ago, but I've been lazy... and distracted. I think this is probably my best painting so far. I had a lot of fun just finding a good spot to paint, and the painting itself was, of course, fun as well.

And here's a shot of the location, with my blank canvas.

There was some huge bird that came by at one point, I was thinking about adding him into the painting, maybe I'll still do that... sometime.

~Adam

Five OH!

Yes, that's right, welcome to my fiftieth post in this blog! Woohoo! To celebrate I updated the gallery to include a lot of the stuff I've done in the past few months. (It's a tedious process and I don't like to do it often) So if you haven't seen everything, please check it out.

I finished my first full color painting today. It took me somewhere between 5 and 6 hours to complete over 2 days. Here's a shot from the end of day 1:

And here's the final product :

(A photo of the real thing if you want to compare)

Looking back at some of the older things in the gallery it's clear that I've gotten at least a little bit better, hopefully I can keep it up. Thanks for sticking with me.

~Adam