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.

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: