Winter Demon: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #9

I'll be completely honest. I'm not quite sure what I've created this time. It was supposed to be a "portrait," according to the latest Work of Art challenge rules. I think it's some sort of wintery demon beast stained window thingie. Yeah, that's the official title. It looks something like this:




What was I trying to accomplish? Good question. My initial thought was of creating a collagey Old Man Winter. I started with a rough sketch, distorted it with various fancy cyber effects, then cut out pieces. I layered textures like these into the background:









Interesting. Well, there you have it... my portrait of a scary winter...?

Only one challenge left...

Cartastrophe - Emily Week 7

The challenge this week was to make artwork using car parts. Hmmm… The home interpretation was a little bit different. We were allowed to use pictures of car parts as well. My interpretation was even more loose than that. I decided to use the names of car parts and make a word cloud. I used Wordle, which is an awesome site. Just for fun, this is a word cloud using the feed from this blog:


Lovely. For my project I used Wikipedia to look up a million car parts for my word cloud. (Because I can only name about 5...) I mixed up the colors and fonts a few times to get multiple layouts and then I printed them each out. From there I intensely labored to form each of these word clouds into an actual working and functioning car. Here is my final project:



I decided this project would be best suited to hang in a child’s bedroom. Or be made by a child to hang in a father’s office. Either way, incredible. Enjoy!

Rules for artwork inspired by Work of Art, Season 2, Challenge #9

We've made it to the next-to-last challenge! And here it is... The Work of Art contestants went to a small town, where they had to find a subject for a portrait. For our interpretation, we don't have to travel to a small town, but we will find someone and create a portrait.

Due date: Monday, 19 December, 6 pm.

Update: the holidays have completely thrown my schedule off!! So the portrait challenge will now be due 28 December. K? Good. :)

Perfumed: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #8

Emily? Emily? Are you still there?

*silence*

Well, I'm sure we'll hear from her eventually. Just pretend she's on a backpacking trip through Central Eurasia, where Internet connectivity is limited. (no, she's not, but we're helping her have an excuse)

*ahem*

On to this week's challenge. According to the rules, this week's Work of Art challenge was to create artwork that could be sold on the street (or somewhere else) AND shown in a gallery. I think I successfully ended up with a piece that might not succeed at either. But that's okay! It was a fantastic learning experience, which, really, is the purpose of all this. Here's the final piece:


"What on earth is that??" you might ask. Well, I was trying to expand upon "Surf's Up," taking pixel art to a whole new level. I've had this idea for a while... I took an old keyboard, pulled off all the keys, and discovered... that if you buy a used keyboard off eBay, it really is USED. With all the cheezy puff crumbs, chocolate bits, and who knows what else its former left behind. Ewww, nastiness... So Step 1 was to sanitize the keys:

Since we started our blog in October 2011, I decided to make a 10x11 piece of pixel art. Just kidding, it was a math exercise. Given the number of keys pulled from the keyboard, 10x11 was the biggest I could make it. Huh, both explanations are equally geeky. Never mind.

I went back to my MS Paint method for transforming photographs into 10x11 pixel graphics. Here were a few of the others I considered:





Eventually I settled on this picture of a purple flower:


I then used acrylic craft paints to paint each key according to the colors in the grid. Minor detail--I didn't exactly have the right paint shades to recreate the colors from the inspiration picture. So I approximated. Nah, I just plain made it up. Good enough. Here are some work-in-progress pictures:







Keys are kind of hard to paint... The bottoms are uneven, and each key has a different shape and size. As you can see, in some cases I used a long key (shift, space bar, ...) to represent multiple keys. Key shapes work well for typing efficiency, but they certainly complicate repurposing keys for mosaics.

After painting all of the keys I considered background options. A chessboard? It took me a minute to remember that a chessboard is only an 8x8 grid (what can I say, I never got into that sport - and I mean chess boxing). Then I remembered I had some black and white skull wrapping paper. Yes, that's right, I do have that lying around my home. Don't judge me.


Back to the important stuff... I used that craft gluey stuff to affix the painted keys to the wrapping paper.


And voila, here's the final result!



And a tiny version (to verify that the pattern is at least consistent with the original pixelated flower):


Since it's not so much a flower as the essence of a flower, I decided to call it "Perfumed." That is, a perfume takes the essence of a flower, and... ok, I'm gonna stop talking now. Stop laughing at my attempt at a work of art with commercial appeal. Just go and watch the chess boxing videos.

Rules for artwork inspired by Work of Art, Season 2, Challenge #8

Well, I'm still hopeful that Emily will post her Challenge #7 results. But for now, I'm gonna post the new challenge. It's pretty straightforward... this week we are supposed to make a work of art that is commercial (on the show they were required to sell it on the street), but also belongs in a gallery. Due date: 6 pm Monday, 12 December?

Carleidoscope: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #7

As you are aware (thanks to this posting), this week's Work of Art challenge was to create artwork out of a piece of a car. Our modification of the challenge (to fit our slightly less than vast resources) included photographs of cars and car parts. So here's what I created:


What is this?? This, my friends, is my Carleidescope. More specifically, it's a pattern made from tiny images of cars.

My process:

I started out in Picasa... I arbitrarily reviewed albums of pictures I've taken, and tagged pictures that contained cars. I then created an album out of my car tag (Tools --> Experimental --> Show tags as album), which looked something like this:


I needed some sort of grid to guide my cutting and pasting of tiny car pictures. I made a 10" x 10" scribble, then pixelated it (100x100 pixels). Then I copied square-ish segments of my tagged car pictures into various quadrants of my pixelated scribble. What does that mean? It means I did this:


And I added more and more tiny car pictures...







...and eventually filled the entire grid with tiny car pics:




Here is a close up of my final artwork:


And here it is as a thumbnail:


And finally I made a desktop wallpaper-sized version:


Tiled desktop background!


...and that's all 'til next week! :)

Rules for artwork inspired by Work of Art, Season 2, Challenge #7

As you may have noticed, we had a little vacation from blogging last week. There was no episode of Work of Art! We're back this week, with a new challenge: create a work of art using at least one car part. Technically, the contestants were limited to parts from one kind of car. We're opening our challenge up to parts from whatever car we choose (no, we are not planning to steal parts from cars). And in defiance of Emily's request, I hereby proclaim that photographs of car parts are also acceptable. Take that, Emily.

Due date: 6 p.m. on Monday, 5 December. (take note, Emily!!)

Here's how our last challenge turned out:

Emily's Street Art

The challenge this week was a lot of fun. We had to create street art and I LOVE street art. It's basically any art you find in the streets for everyone to see. Everything from yarnbombing to Ellis G. to Paper Monster. I’m a huge fan. For my own project, I enlisted some help. First I’ll show you the final project so you don’t get too bored with all the “making of” details. Voila!

Josh and I spent Thanksgiving week touring the city (DC) and taking pictures of what we saw. We found the brick wall in Baltimore and instantly fell in love with it and chose it as the background. (Since we couldn't exactly paint right on it, we had to take some pictures and go that route.)

These pictures were taken at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum (which is TONS of fun!). Can you name this president? We added one of his quotes to the final piece as well.

We also featured some simple light painting.

Then Josh combined everything together on the computer using whatever he used doing it however he did....

And....once again.....