Crayolava - Emily's Week 2 Challenge

First things first, sorry for the delay in posting. I had my wisdom teeth yanked out and, naturally, I could have died. But all is well. On to the challenge.

This week's challenge was all about motion. We had to create something using motion and parkour as our inspiration. I decided to hit the dollar store to look around and come up with my final plan. After searching through all the Halloween decor and random housewares, I finally decided on some colorful crayons (that's pronounced "crayins" if you're Josh). I returned home and decided what to do. I would use crayons and heat to create my masterpiece. These were my tools:


I wanted to use motion in my actual art piece, so I got to work. This involved removing the wrappers from the crayons and lining them up by color.


Then came the fun part! Using a heat tool, I heated the crayons to create awesome dripping patterns. The motion of the dripping crayons created the art. I love the way it looks!


Now for my final project, called "Crayolava."


This was a fun project. I love color and this was just my thing! I learned a lot along the way, too. For example, some crayon colors don't melt. They just bubble and start smoking. It's very strange. And some melt very quickly (as you can see by the longest drips). I also wanted my final project to have a more unexpected look, and that's why I decided to display it with the drips going up instead of down. Take that, gravity! Well, that's all for this week. What do you think?

Ttylbffs,
-E

Surf's Up: Kristine's entry for Work of Art Challenge #2

First, the bad news... Emily's art project for Work of Art Challenge #2 is delayed. There definitely is a difference between reality TV shows and real life... they only have their show to worry about. We have work and all sorts of other things. Don't be too hard on Emily; she's getting her wisdom teeth pulled tomorrow! She's promised to submit her final project by Wednesday evening. Good thing we make our own rules!

In the meantime, here is my project...

To recap, this week's challenge was to design a piece based on motion, inspired by parkour. It was a team challenge for the Work of Art contestants... since it's just me and Emily, we were on our own.

Here are my before (the photo that served as inspiration) and after pictures:

I decided I wanted to make pixel art. My medium: oil paints. I looked through old pictures I've taken that represent motion, and used Microsoft Paint (sometimes the simplest solution is best!) to resize the main part of the photos to 30 pixels wide. Here are some of the ones I liked:




After much dramatic internal debate, I settled on this surfing picture:


I took this picture back in August 2005, at the East Coast Surfing Championships in Virginia Beach (we were actually there to see Carbon Leaf). I chose this picture because both the surfer and the wave demonstrate movement, and even though surfing isn't parkour, it's something athletic that I can't do. Yet. :)

Now that I'd selected my photo, I prepared my canvas. Using a pencil, I drew my grid:

As you can see, I opted not to use squares. Instead, I took more inspiration from the idea of motion. In sci fi movies, when a spaceship goes into warp speed/FTL, you get this sort of stretching of the image. I recreated that idea, with narrower columns on the left and wider columns on the right. Did it really make much difference in the final painting? Well, no, not really. But hey, I was trying to demonstrate motion!

I then used the pixelated image (26x20 pixels) as a guide, and used oil paints to create my version of the surfer. Here are some pictures of my process. If you're wondering about my painting order, I was trying to go by color themes (reds, then flesh tones, then greens, etc.).





The painting process took FOREVER! I did the big reality show challenge no-no--I chose something that was waaaay overcomplicated. I could have scaled this back a lot (smaller canvas, convert to fewer colors, ...). As you can see, I wasn't even worrying about being all that neat in my painting... still, it took ages. My arm is sore. I do like the finished product, though.

Along the way I discovered that I had accidentally painted a creepy face into one of the boxes:


It's a little bit easier to see the surfer in thumbnail-sized pictures of my process. Here he is, from start to finish:

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

This week is all about Parkour. That means Emily has to jump around walls and stuff, and make art out of the blood that results from her experience. OK, not really... but the Work of Art challenge is indeed about motion, inspired by Parkour. Technically this is a group challenge--the show's contestants were divided into two groups, and are making individual pieces that individually and collectively represent movement. So, naturally, Emily and I performed extremely complex differential calculus and divided ourselves into two groups. She is the team captain of her group, but I am just a lowly peon in my group (the team lead has something against me... I predict lots of dramatic team conflict, which is pretty much the lifeblood of reality TV).

Team Emily and Team Kristine will complete the Parkour-inspired challenges no later than 5:00 p.m. (East Coast time) on Sunday. Supplies can be purchased, but we're not going crazy... unless Emily was serious about building a car from scratch. I bet she'll do it.

Tune back in Sunday evening for our final products!

As a reminder of our past artistic glory, these were the end products from Challenge #1:


(and p.s., you still have time to vote for my Challenge #1 artwork as the winning piece)

-- Kristine