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.....

I'm No Street Artist: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #6

This week's Work of Art challenge got the best of me. I'm pretty sure I demonstrated that I not only lack street art skills, but that I don't even know where to start when trying to create a work of street art. Ha. Here's what I ended up making:


I guess I started out with an OK idea. Initially I considered buying a bunch of legos, and using them to create a "wall," upon which I would paint something street art-ish. In developing this idea further, I decided I could upgrade from legos to Jenga, and create a mini building to use as my canvas. Except I could only find Jenga Holiday Edition:


As friendly as the holiday theme was, it didn't quite fit my big city building concept. So what did I do? I bought some cheap acrylic craft paint, and turned these bricks red!


Oh, wait, it gets better. It wasn't enough to have big red bricks. I needed to make smaller brick patterns... and did so, in thin black pen. Turns out, it's not easy to draw on Jenga bricks. Here is my attempt at turning the bricks into yet smaller bricks:

Next I needed a suitable background. A few days ago Emily mentioned chalkboard paint. I thought that sounded interesting! I decided to make a city nighttime skyline for the background. I used chalkboard paint for the buildings, and more cheap acrylic craft paint for the sky:


I used chalk for the background building outlines, windows, and stars. Then I used my favorite thin black pen and drew tiny windows on tiny post-it notes. And this is my stellar final piece:


Should I even try to justify this as "street art"? Probably not. But I'll try anyway. It involved the use of chalk, and some street art uses chalk? I made brick designs, and sometimes street art appears upon bricks? Aw, I give up. I promise, next week's art project will be much, much better. It definitely might be much better. It may possible be slightly better. Or perhaps worse? I tried!! Really!

Rules for artwork inspired by Work of Art, Season 2, Challenge #6

This week's Work of Art challenge is a little bit unfortunate... for Tewz, that is. The show's street art specialist was eliminated just before the street art challenge!! Oops, sorry, I forgot to say "spoilers!" Sorry!

That's right, we're doing a street art challenge this week. Hooray, we get to deface public property!! Um, no. Ours isn't even going to be public (well... except for the blog postings at the end of the challenge). We're going to do a lawful, scaled down version of this challenge. It's as simple as this: create our own interpretation of street art. Due date: Monday, 21 November. I'll post my blog that night, and Emily will add hers whenever she feeeeels like it. Oh, technically this one's a team challenge... so collaboration is allowed, if desired.

To remind you, here were our pieces that were inspired by last week's newspaper challenge:

Salmoney - Emily #5

The challenge this week was to create an art piece based on a newspaper article. The article I chose was from the Manteca Bulletin in Manteca, CA. It was called "Salmon giveaway helps feed people." It was a very interesting piece....I'm sure. I never read it. I felt that would ... damage the creative process... or something... Anyway... I decided to play around with typography. I love fonts, and letters, and handwritten things. I don't really have very many pictures of the project as I was creating it, but here is my final piece:


The background (using the actual article):



Here is the writing with no background:



And here is another (parody) version I did especially for my mother. (She is a diehard Rushdie fan.):


Well, there you have it. ENJOY!!!
-E

3pic St0rm: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #5

As you may remember (especially if you refresh your memory by rereading the rules), this week Work of Art inspired us to create artwork based on a newspaper headline. I selected "EPIC STORM BEARS DOWN" from the 11/9 Anchorage Daily News. Here is my final product:



I spent my challenge time trying to figure out how to do stop motion animation. It was educational... and fairly time consuming!! I was inspired by Bayete's Challenge #4 art project on the TV show. He took a stationary black and white piece of art, and added both color and movement. I think he should have won that challenge!

Getting back to my piece, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to try stop motion animation. It could never be as good as the incredible Jellybean Video, but I liked my epic storm! (incidentally, you can't watch the Jellybean Video without watching the equally fascinating Making Of video!)

My process:

I sketched out a basic storyboard:


Next I attempted some rough sketches:


I then drew my final sketches. I used a thin Sharpie and a drawing pad. What can I say? I've got vast resources. Here are some of my sketches:





If you watched the video, you can probably tell that I didn't implement all of my ideas. I originally wanted to have the water recede, add a snowstorm, and then crush the house with a meteorite... then a flower would grow out of the crater. However, Paint Shop Pro decided to crash around the point where the fish made it halfway across the floodwater. I took that as a sign that I was done.

Oh, but you probably have other questions! How did these little drawings become integrated into the video? How did I add color? And how did I integrate the newspaper into my video? I did the rest on my computer... a bit of picture editing to remove the background, and then I turned to the Anchorage Daily News for the color. I integrated some text, but mostly focused on the amazing photo footage of last week's epic Bering Sea storm. Favorites included a frozen whirlpool, pictures of the storm, and icy waves. I colored my black and white drawings with text and photo mosaics of the storm. Examples:

Note that the photo mosaic behind the main part of the house is that funky frozen whirlpool photo! <3My personal favorite is my Nome Fish. I created the photo mosaic from a picture of people boarding up the Nome Trading Post:When I finished completing the 100+ frames for the video I used Windows Live Movie Maker (yay, it's free!) to turn the stills into a video. The application is geared more toward photo slideshows, but I was able to change the rate to 4 slides per second... good enough for my purposes!

And here is the final still image from the video:


I wonder what we'll get next week! Will I continue my trend of learning new artistic techniques? Stay tuned!!

Rules for artwork inspired by Work of Art, Season 2, Challenge #5

This week the Work of Art contestants visited the New York Times. The challenge? Find a newspaper headline to inspire you... and use the actual newspaper in your artwork. Emily and I opted not to limit ourselves to the New York Times, and went to the Newseum's "Today's Front Pages" site to choose our headlines.

My choice was from the 11/9 Anchorage Daily News: "EPIC STORM BEARS DOWN"
Emily selected a headline from the 11/9 Manteca Bulletin: "Salmon giveaway helps feed people"

Deadline: 6:00 p.m. on Monday, 14 November.

Here's a reminder of last week's works of art:

Tofurkey Collabo - Emily Week 4

The challenge this week was a lot of fun. We had to draw inspiration from children's artwork and create our own piece with a visible connection to our inspiration piece. When I first heard the challenge, I was reminded of this artist that I discovered a long time ago at the beginning of my StumbleUpon days. He recreates children’s drawings in his photographs. Very neat.

As for my sister and I….Naturally, we enlisted our niece and nephews to help us out. My sister used my niece’s drawing as inspiration. I used my nephew’s picture as inspiration. Here is his awesome turkey art with my finished piece:

Nice job, Little Robbie! I love the texture and all the color. What a fun turkey for Thanksgiving!

Both my sister and I used this piece by our nephew Benjamin as inspiration as well. His and mine:

I love the color. In school, it was obvious what projects were mine because they were always very brightly colored. Benjamin’s piece was great for me!

Back to the beginning... I’ve been wanting to make a cake for a while now, and I thought this challenge would be the perfect opportunity. Especially when I saw my inspiration pieces! I love baking and desserts (even still after I’ve done it for a job!) and it just might be my favorite type of artwork. There is so much room for creativity. AND it tastes great! To make the turkey cake, I threw on an apron and enlisted the help of my mixer. I used chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and ganache. I used sugar cookie and a fun swirly tie-dye technique to connect with my nephew Benjamin’s art piece. Here are some pictures from along the way.

And, yes, it tasted great. Thanks again to Robbie, Lauren, and Benjamin. See you next week!

-E

Scene on the Path: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #4

This week I created more of an arts and crafts project than a work of art! The challenge inspired by this week's episode of Work of Art was to create a work of art that relates to a piece of art made by a child (click here for this week's rules). Here is my finished work of art for the week:



As a reminder, here are the two drawings that inspired my artwork:


(My niece Lauren's drawing on the left, and my nephew Benjamin's drawing on the right)

The first thing you probably noticed when you looked at my piece was that it's very busy. Lauren's drawing was so full of joy that I decided to use it all as inspiration. I packed in all of the fun things I might see on a walk in a garden with my niece... if she didn't live across the country from me!

The sky, trees, birds (I went with poultry), flowers, snails... It occurred to me that I have taken pictures of many such things. So I spent a bunch of time reviewing all those nearly forgotten old folders of photos on my computer. Ahhh, the memories!! I'd forgotten some of those colors exist... especially those amazing sunsets.

Here are the individual photo collages:

This one was based on trees (summer, autumn, winter, and spring), birds (swans, chickens, and ducks), and for the rocks in Lauren's drawing, various pictures of the ground. I tried to make it vibrant and colorful (like her drawing).



This collage contains clips from some of my favorite sky and cloud photos. Sunsets, rainbows, and an Elmo balloon floating through the air. It's whimsical. :)

And the last collage has a tiny snail in the middle, surrounded by happy looking flowers.

It was harder than I anticipated to work Benjamin's drawing into the overall piece. After some thought, I decided the yellow line represented a path... 'cuz, hey, Lauren's drawing had a path as well! What can I say, I wanted some sort of connection. Now that I had one, I drew a black and white ink piece representing paths around patches of grass. Not colorful enough... I made an abstract green and yellow watercolor painting--also representing a path through a nice grassy park or something--then used Paint Shop Pro to merge the two.

Original drawing and painting.


After being merged in PSP.

And finally, the full, busy piece of art... 3/4 collage, 1/4 abstract, with all representing observations along a path:


Maybe this week my piece will be voted #1? LOL, my expectations aren't high after last week, when Emily got votes before she had even posted her art project! Very suspicious...