College: so much supplies and so little space

So, as you know, I am preparing to go back to the wonderful world of college in a few days and so, I spent all of today packing and sorting all my art supplies.  Now since NONE of my art teachers have responded to me or sent me any sort of supply lists, I just have to overpack and hope for the best (and bring a lot of gift cards for the art stores in town).

My main worry for move in day is my roommate running out of the room, terrified that she's living with a hoarder who brought 8 boxes of art supplies on the first day.

In order to avoid this scenario, I am discreetly going to bring up my materials in different waves.  Since I live close by, my parents are going to bring my materials over the course of a few days, so I don't get overwhelmed the first day.  The hope is that I will also have an art locker (and HOPEFULLY a BFA art studio to work in) but we'll see.

For my first wave, I'm just bringing up the supplies I HAVE TO HAVE.  I also plan on working the weekend before classes start (such an overachiever) and I want to start working on another paper cutout model of my church.

So far my list is as follows:

FIRST WAVE-

• Mungyo Gallery Soft Oil Pastels (3 old boxes of 48)
• Portfolio Water Soluble Oil Pastels (3 new boxes of 12)
• 3 Sennelier oil pastels (black, gray, and white)
• All tortillons I have on hand
• Prang watercolors (half and full pan)
• 4 cheap brushes
• 5 vine charcoal sticks of various sizes in a glass jar
• 2 Scraper tools
• 5 Color Shapers
• 2 Trays to hold water (for watercolors)
• 3 pieces of wood (16" x 4" x .25")
• Metal ruler
• 6" clear ruler
• T-Square
• Triangle Ruler (can't live without it)
• Tape Measure
• Scissors
• Smart Living Invisible Tape (6)
• Sandpaper (varying tooths and sheet sizes)
• thumb tacks
• 2 Strathmore Sketchpads 5.5" x 8.5", 100 sheets each
• Plastic portfolio 30" x 23"
• first aid kid (I'm clumsy)
• box cutter
• Cutting Mat 16" x 23"
• 6 Kneadable Erasers
• Pearl Eraser
• Camera/Charger
• Flashlight and Lamp (for light sources)
• pencil sharpener
• pack of Ticonderoga #2 pencils
• 8 leadless pencils
• pack of Bic round stic black pens
• a box full of old colored pencils of various brands, sizes, and colors
• giant drawing board with clips
• MY SAVIOR - my lap desk (a comfy drawing board with clips, a pillow underneath it, and indents to store all of my tools when I'm working

SECOND WAVE-

• 9 Oil Paint Tubes
• 2 Sable brushes
• 4 dead brushes (last year was a bad year)
• brush cleaner
• gamsol
• galkyd 
• 3 alcohol inks (Adirondack brights - red, blue, and yellow) 
• Alcohol Blending Solution
• India ink
• Sumi ink
• Face/Mouth mask (for charcoal)
• extra xacto knife (for my possible studio)
• 100 No. 11 xacto blades
• Iridescent Medium
• Ox Gall Liquid
• Masking Fluid
• Gum Arabic
• A Sponge (found in Hobby Lobby) - good for texture
• YES! Paste
• Scotch blue painter's tape
• electrical tape
• 4 Sharpies 
• 3 Golden Artist Colors Acrylic Paint tubes (red, blue, and yellow)
• Strathmore Sketchpad 5.5" x 8.5", 100 sheets
• Borden & Riley #880s Royal Sketch Book 6" x 9", 60 sheets
• Strathmore Watercolor pad 9" x 12", 12 sheets
• scrap pieces of tracing paper
• Canson XL Mixed Media Pad 18" x 24"
• Canson Drawing Pad 18" x 24"
• Strathmore Newsprint Pad 18" x 24"
• Canson Watercolor Pad 18" x 24" 
• Yupo Sheet (huge)
• Arches Paper 22" x 28" (around 7 sheets)
• Any old artworks, references, art magazines I feel are inspiring enough to bring back with me
• As much scrap paper as humanly possible

And there you have it.  This is the chaos that I'm living with right now.  I am taking a figure drawing class and a painting class next semester with professors I've never heard of, so I really have nothing to base my supply list on.  I can't say that I've used all of the materials mentioned since a lot of art professors make you buy a ton of stuff and never use it in their classes.  Honestly, if any of you know anything about Iridescent Medium, Ox Gall Liquid, Masking Fluid, or Gum Arabic PLEASE tell me!  

Anyway, thanks for listening to my hectic life.  Now that everything artsy is sorted (for the most part) I can go on to packing and sorting through all the clothes and books in my closet, YAY! *collapses from exhaustion*

Home Stretch!

Wow, 5 days left until I go back to school - which translates to 4 main work days and one packing day.  I'm trying to plan and sketch one of my last pieces of the summer which was inspired by the challenge #drawthisagain .  I plan to redo my glass squirrel picture again for the third time since 2012.  Let's hope I finish in time!

I'm also trying my best to write up and film the video on subtraction I've been working on and I also promised Lady Avolate (a good friend of mine) that I would try to do a dance video of Last of the Wilds by Nightwish.  While I don't have the editing tools, space or time alone to do it at home, I have already cut the song and am thinking of steps and choreography, so we'll see when that gets done.

Also, just to give you an idea of my progress the last few years, here are my two glass squirrel oil pastel pictures:


The first is from the summer of 2012, right before my senior year of high school and AP Art.

The second is from March of 2015.  It was made during my junior year of college for my Thematic Drawing class.  It was the first drawing I did in oil pastel and also one of the last since the professor hated oil pastels.  She also hated color which explains the sad lack of color.

My next picture (the one I'm working on this week) will also be in oil pastel and will thankfully be in color.  Getting started on it right now! Woohoo!

And Another One Done!

Woohoo! Just finished this piece a couple of minutes ago.  This piece looked hideous for so long that I'm actually excited it came out looking a little less ugly.  I definitely have trouble following through with my artwork and committing to ideas, so this was a practice of that more than anything else.  I created the base picture with all forms created and shaded with oil pastel - like I would do for any normal artwork of mine - except I left the figure and background lighter than usual.  Instead, I went over the whole thing with black charcoal in the darker areas to give it that extra layer of a smoky, rich black.  I only have 12 more days until I go back to school, so I'm trying to finish up as much as possible and straighten out my BFA ideas before classes begin.  

This piece is based on some Hermione/Lupin fanfiction (don't judge) I stumbled across where she ends up being bitten by a werewolf.  I am in love with the story and it made me start to research more about werewolf art and how artists depict the transformation.  Not to mention, I also just did another 2 hour "photoshoot" session where I just do random poses with random lighting and props and see what pictures inspire me.  I just completed another fabric "photoshoot" which only lasted for an hour since I was getting frustrated by the end, but I got a lot of creepy, twisted forms out of it, so I can't wait to start drawing them.  

I also just saw my new dorm room today and am freaking out since it is half the space I had the last 2 years.  I don't know where I'm going to store all of my at supplies since the desk is just a small board attached to the foot board of my bed.  There is no storage space and I haven't even begun to think where I can work in this tiny space that I will be sharing with a girl who is not an art major.  Needless to say, my anxiety is through the roof.  

Any video suggestions you might have for my artist channel can be left in the comments below, on my facebook page, or my youtube channel.  I am trying to at least do one or two more videos before college starts - but if I get more suggestions, I'll do more.  So far, I have the requested sgraffito video planned and I thought I might do one on what art supplies I'm taking with me to college.  Also, I have another piece (sgraffito) nearly done, so I will post that and show how I made it in my tutorial video.  

New Video!

Hi guys, just posted my new ART That video on my charcoal and oil pastel work.  Next up is a video someone in the comments asked me to make on sgraffito with oil pastels, so now I just have to decide what piece I'll be making for that video.  As always, I would love to hear from you - any comments, concerns, questions, suggestions, etc.  I only have a few weeks left before I go back to college, so I want to get as much done as possible before then.

I want to map out some of my BFA pictures and my theme a LOT more.  I have a huge list of books I want to read and some that also relate to my theme.  I also want to get ALL reference pictures I could ever want or imagine done while I'm at home since I won't be in a room with an art major this year and I will have no real personal space or time to myself.  And finally, I want to share as much as I can here and on Facebook and my Youtube page.  I'm reading a book called "Show Your Work!" by Austin Kleon and I would DEFINITELY recommend it!  It provides me with motivation and makes me want to work and share and build a community and network of artists.  Anyway, that's enough of my rambling for the night.  Good night everyone!

Charcoal Experiment #2

For the second day in a row I created another charcoal oil pastel piece.  (I apologize for not posting my religious theme story like I promised in my last post, but it's 2 am and this was easier to cover before bed.)

This time, I continued with the whole fabric thing I have going on at the moment.  Funny enough, I'm still referencing and being inspired by pictures I took 2 year ago at college of my roommate with my bed sheet over her.  I'm so glad I organize my reference pictures by year and subject so I can easily access them.

This time, to further experiment, I tried to apply the charcoal to a base layer of Portfolio series water soluble oil pastels instead of my usual Mungyo Gallery soft oil pastels.  The reason for this being that the Portfolio pastels are incredibly cheap and I have tons of boxes of them.  Therefore, I love to use them when I work on huge projects, like when my professors tell me to do 3 feet x 4 feet projects (which actually happens quite often).  My Mungyo pastels are far to precious to waste like that, so I sacrifice a little bit of quality on my larger works so I can save money (college student budget).

This time, my piece turned out quite well with no noticeable changes as far as the charcoal sticking and blending are concerned.  This piece is 5.5"x 8.5" and was created on Strathmore Sketch paper (my favorite kind of all-purpose sketch books).

Experimentation and a Possible Theme

So this week I've been thinking about my strengths and some possible theme ideas for my BFA.  Originally my theme was impermanence, which I then narrowed down to my religious experiences.

I went back and looked at all my old artwork and found that the pieces I was most proud of were from two years ago during my foundations art year.  Those pieces were drawn mostly from life with some intense shadows and dramatic light sources.  I also found I love the methodical process of drawing fabric.

Though it wasn't my original idea to use religion and fabric together, now I find myself wanting to find a way to fit them together.  I promise the next post will go into my whole experiences with my church, but for length purposes, I thought it would be better to separate the posts.

I also want to say that I am in no way anti-Catholic or atheist or anti-church.  I still identify as a Roman Catholic and go to church regularly.  I've just had some bad experiences with corruption in the church that have made me struggle with my faith.

Now onto what I've been working on today.  I love drawing fabric, but find it's easiest to draw with pencil and charcoal.  The only problem is that I despise charcoal since it can just be wiped away in an instant (done it before by accident) and I hate breathing it in and getting it everywhere.  But now, I think I've found the perfect solution for me.

 My main medium is oil pastel, so I did one layer of pastels, blending them in with my fingers and I had a slight gradient to them to match the lighting of my reference picture.

From there, I did a separate drawing of the same figure on a piece of paper (the same size) mapping out the lights and darks of the piece.

 I then cut of the dark forms with my box cutter (since my xacto knife is mysteriously missing) and cut out the background as well since that too is dark.

Next I ground up some vine charcoal on some scrap paper, wiped my brush in it (just the cheapest paintbrush I could buy) and dabbed it on the stencil over my original oil pastel background.

I then removed the stencil and continued to play with brushes and creating lines and gradients in the picture.

My first test with a snowflake pattern cutout

The oil pastel locked in the charcoal so it doesn't move (unless I blend it out) and stays fixed to the paper.  It also creates that lovely smoky effect that charcoal is known for.  I want to experiment more with this because it sounds like a pretty awesome idea and I definitely need to work with it more.  It would look amazing as a large scale drawing, but I think I may be running low on my preferred Mungyo Soft oil pastels, so we'll see.

 As always, feel free to give me feedback and tell me what I should do next.  I want to make a Facebook page and get more of my art online, so we'll see when I decide to take on that project. Until next time!

One awesome video and two mediocre ones

Here are my completed videos for my class' first project cluster.  I'm so relieved that they are all finally done!

This is my awesome Irish Dance video complete with explosions from DatMrRyan's channel:

This is my documentary on media addiction:

And last but not least, this is my awkward attempt at an oil pastel demo.  Enjoy!

Instructional Video Project Research

While I'm working on my documentary project, I have also been thinking about my instructional video that has to be under 10 minutes long.  Right now I am leaning towards making it on art, specifically working with oil pastels since I've heard a lot of negative criticism of them from professors at school.  I have been watching and critiquing videos to see how others approach this topic.

Recently I found this video on youtube:

Though it was a somewhat decent tutorial, there were several things wrong with the video.  One of the most distracting elements of the video for me was the setting.  You can hear airplanes, birds and wind which all distract from the artist's voice.  He also filmed under a tree, so the sun hitting the paper also causes a distraction since it is constantly moving around.  Overall, I give the artist a lot of credit for having such smooth blending with cray-pas oil pastels which are cheaply made and hard to work with.

I think my documentary will be broken up into different sections and I will have more vocabulary words/descriptions on screen.  I have a lot of different brands of oil pastel, so I might talk about differences between brands as well.  I find that a lot of the time, teachers dismiss them because they think I will use a cheap, waxy pastel that will look terrible.