Art I Was An Art Student Once

[Dragon Warrior]

Let's be frank here, folks. Being an art student can suck. I'm one of those average college students who attempt every creative major possible to avoid going to school for the career they really want to do, and then eventually fall safely into the niche of said career. So I've been a graphic design major, illustration major, music major, advertising major, culinary major... blah blah blah... I'm a theatre major now. But during my time of attending my school's arts program, I learned a very important lesson: art schools despise originality.

That's not always the case. Just the schools like mine that are pretty stuck up about their pride in their program and insist you do it their way. So I left for a better time. However, I did gain some interesting art and I'm here to show you folks some of it. Pick it apart if you want... I would too. It was fun making it, but it's not my best work. And though the craft is a tad sketchy, the school actually graded me down for being too different from what everyone else was doing. Funny, right?

[b][url="http://i55.tinypic.com/30to4co.jpg"]Graphic Design Composition 1[/url][/b]
Basically for this one we had to create an image by taking several other images from the web and combining them. Most of the stuff in this piece isn't actually what it was used for, save maybe the tree or whales. For example, the lightning was not actually lightning but light taken from another image and extended. The smoke/mist around the forests and mountains were actually oceans I recolored and messed with. I got an A because my graphic design teacher was one of the only ones there that liked my work hah.

[b][url="http://i54.tinypic.com/16k0qw9.jpg"]Graphic Design Composition 2[/url][/b]
This one is the same project as the above one... but since my first composition was warm, I decided to take a cool approach.

[b][url="http://i56.tinypic.com/34q4ndi.jpg"]Wood Extension[/url]
[url="http://i53.tinypic.com/1qk1me.jpg"]Wood Extension (2)[/url][/b]
Go ahead, laugh at the name; I did. We had to take a piece of wood we're given and "extend" it somehow. I chose to do mine a little more creatively. I made a frame out of mine and then photoshopped the rest of it. I hung it in the woods, so the winter forest is real. The summer picture within the frame represents the life we want, the beautiful summer, the gorgeous weather... and the winter outside the frame is the reality of the world.

[b][url="http://i55.tinypic.com/21obms7.jpg"]Negative Space[/url]
[url="http://i51.tinypic.com/2ahrvx4.jpg"]Negative Space (2)[/url]
[url="http://i55.tinypic.com/5ye1hw.jpg"]Negative Space (3)[/url]
[url="http://i52.tinypic.com/2zi99jr.jpg"]Negative Space (4)[/url][/b]
This was a fun piece to do. Basically you have to build a structure out of cardboard to represent the negative space of an area. So we had to choose a spot in a building (mine being a window), then build my cardboard structure around that window filling the open air. Then for kicks the teacher also made us insert a body part to work around, mine being my shoulder. It looked pretty plain so I got crazy and built spikes coming out of it. Then I burnt the hell out of it to give it a decaying look. Hooray for creativity!

[b][url="http://i51.tinypic.com/551bhi.jpg"]Planar Project[/url]
[url="http://i54.tinypic.com/jim9tj.jpg"]Planar Project (2)[/url]
[url="http://i51.tinypic.com/wrfitz.jpg"]Planar Project (3)[/url]
[url="http://i51.tinypic.com/24edct2.jpg"]Planar Project (4)[/url]
[url="http://i52.tinypic.com/amp4w2.jpg"]Planar Project (5)[/url]
[url="http://i52.tinypic.com/dfj7mr.jpg"]Planar Project (6)[/url]
[url="http://i54.tinypic.com/14iznma.jpg"]Planar Project (7)[/url][/b]
My pride and joy of my art semesters at GVSU. We had to select an architect and a sculpture artist for this assignment and use them as an influence to make a structure that's an abstraction of normal architecture. I chose the artist Kris Kuksi (look him up!), so mine was a lot different than everyone else's where I had to add a bunch of tiny details to mine. I added moss and parts from model airplanes and such. I wanted my structure to have that feel of nature growing over an old mechanical past... kind of like lost, ancient technology. The teacher didn't know but this also came from my Hayao Miyazaki inspiration. I would have liked to do so much more with this but I was very limited with what I was allowed to do. I was already way overstepping the bounds of the project by using model airplane parts and such. We were only supposed to use the wood we were issued.

I think those are the few that I think are at least worth showing haha. Some other projects weren't terribly interesting so I won't bother with them. I have more images of some of the 3D structures if someone wants to see a certain view of them I didn't show. Edited December 23, 2010 by Dragon Warrior

[JamesMay]

LMFAO @ Wood Extension.. hahahahah. but on a serious note, the planar project was gorgeous. very impressive.

[Dragon Warrior]

Thank you. It was certainly my favorite to work with, and despite the limitations, I felt I had the most range to work with. I got to actually do my own style with it... sort of haha.

[JamesMay]

did you basically just glue and screw stuff together, spray paint it gray, and slap some moss on it? It looks concrete (which is why its so cool). It looks very organic, not forced. It seems like something you would come across in an old dilapidated factory.

[Dragon Warrior]

Yeah, part of my inspiration, as I said, was Hayao Miyazaki. I don't know if you've seen his film [i]Castle In The Sky[/i], but on the floating fortress it displays ancient technology that was lost and hasn't been used in decades. So it has become enveloped by nature like in the picture below...

[center][img]http://www.digitalmediatree.com/library/image/88/robot_miyazaki.jpg[/img][/center]

That was the idea I was going for. And if I was allowed to use more than one color than just the gray paint that I had to use on the wood, I could've made it look even more so. I kind of cheated by purposely not painting parts of the airplane pieces so the original color of them would show through the gray giving it some quality of deterioration. It did take a lot of time just figuring out where each individual piece would go. And I had plenty of more parts I could have added, but I think if I added too much it'd look cluttered. The empty spaces really help contrast the machinery growing from the structure as well as the moss and I needed that to have the piece look complete. It wasn't random placing at all. Edited December 23, 2010 by Dragon Warrior

[JamesMay]

sick. it would be awesome to keep it outside and promote the moss growth. Living art that lasts!

[Dragon Warrior]

Haha, if only that would work. Alas, it's fake moss. Real moss would just die over time. I also wanted to put more propellers on it to give the consideration that it might've been able to fly once :[ But darnit, those plane parts were expensive! I blew a good sixty to eighty bucks on that.