Interesting Art Technique Installment 1

One of the more interesting techniques that I was exposed to in highschool art was stippling. Stippling is the proccess of creating a picture and shading it using dots. You often start the proccess by finding the picture that you will be using as the subject. If the picture is in color, it is often very helpful to photocopy it in black and white. Next, you draw a grid, often 1x1 inches, onto the photocopy. Then you create another 1x1 inch grid or even a 2x2 inch grid onto a piece of nice paper. You then draw the outline and help lines of the picture onto the nice paper so that the grids match. Once you have transfered the image, you can start stippling. The whole point of stippling is to not make any lines or long marks. Only dots are used to create the outline and shading of the image. You insinuate darker areas with dots closer together and light areas with maybe no dots at all. once you are satisfied with the image you can erase out the pencil grid and enjoy you completed piece of art.

What You Need:
a picture with interesting subject and shading
pencil
straightedge
nice light colored paper
fine point sharpie

finished product:


So yeah, I think everyone should try stippling out! It is a really cool techinique and creates interesting unique pieces.

My new favorite artist

In the process of researching and trying to gather inspiration for various projects in the last month, I have developed a love for many new artists. One of them is a painter and illustrator named Alphonse Mucha. He was born in Moravia (which became the Czech Republic which is now a multitude of countries) in 1860. I love love love vintage art and advertisements, and his are amazing. He is one of the first people to paint in the art nouveau style. His art often depicts women and many of my favorites incorporate nature or the seasons.

Dance

White Star

The Moon

Les Saisons
I honestly think that Mucha is my favorite artist right now. I am sure my absolute favorite will change a lot, but Mucha will always be pretty high on the list. His work is beautiful, elegant, and I am a sucker for vintage art in advertisements, so I am hooked on Mucha.

I love pretty things :)

When I first got my camera for school, I spent a lot of time just messing with it. I hate taking pictures indoors so I would always end up outside. This resulted in many confused looks from my neighbors when they would see me sitting in my front yard taking pictures of grass for an hour wearing hot pink pajama bottoms and a tshirt. But all the looks and grass stains were worth it, because I got some really pretty pictures.






I took a lot of pictures of this one plot of flowers, but somehow some leaves got in there :)

Some of my older work

I really want this blog to interesting and informative about me and my style and process of creating art. I thought that is would be interesting to put up some of my work from highschool on here to show my personal interests and art style. :)



This was a charcoal sketch I did for the portfolio I submitted to the UD. I originally really hated it and didn't want to do it, because I was unfamiliar with charcoal pencils. This is somewhat ironic to me because now all I draw with is charcoal. go figure.



This is what I most often did in highschool. I would find a picture in a magazine and then I would draw it. I have always aspired to be able to draw realistically, instead of going down the road of animation or more cartoon drawing.

The next two pictures are of stipple drawings that I did in highschool. I really enjoyed stippling even though it was tedious. I think the product of this techinique is beautiful and interesting.





All of these pieces were some of my more successful works from higshchool. I really enjoyed all the techniques and processes that I used in highschool and I really believe that they show my personal artisitc style

Peace,
Laura

On a sortof related note..

I know this is a blog for photography overall, but I really wanted to showcase some of my other art work. One of the new, and super cool projects I am doing right now is in design. It is cut paper and composite project which has a great potential for cool work.

This is one of my favorite peices so far in this semester. I really loved Paris and I love old fashioned advertisements so I was excited to combine them to create a really interesting piece.