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.

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! :)

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!

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!!