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!!

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...