My Prodigal Child

I am about to present my pride and joy to the world.

I worked tirelessly on this piece for as long as I can remember during the term.

I am excessively proud of my baby and the delivery was long and hard. 

She was fighting me until the last stroke of the pen.

Ladies and Gentlemen......

May I present my Artist's copy of Alfred Codallo's pen drawing done in 1956...

Drumroll please.....

May I present..... THE BONGO WAKE

I have been accused by many of having printed this and saying that it was done by my hand. By the way, this is a picture of the copy I did. I did not have a suitably large scanner to digitally recreate this piece.

I assure you my dear readers, IT IS MY REPRODUCTION.

Alfred Codallo - The Bongo Wake (1956)

This was the longest I ever took on a single piece of art, approximately three weeks of labour in total.

That is, with breaks in between etc.

I truly admire Alfred Codallo's work and it is unfortunate that he has passed on to the other side already. It would have been an honour to have met this master artist. He's the undisputed king of composition in my opinion.

Oh, I almost forgot...this is my first pen/ink piece.

I await comments...

I'm Back

I can finally take a breath and release a sigh of relief as my end of term exams are completed and my entry for the Republic Bank art competition has been submitted.

As I have some free time, right now, I'm working on adding some music to the blog for some extra nice viewing pleasure of my posts.

I want my followers to be as comfortable as possible when you take the time out of your busy schedule to read my little contributions. I want you to be able to say, "Ah, I've just spent (insert number here) minutes wisely enjoying a beautiful piece of the internet."

VERY, VERY soon, I'll be posting a picture of one of my best pieces of work. It is a copy of an Alfred Codallo pen drawing from 1956. I personally was highly intimidated by this piece of work when I first viewed it. 

But I survived.

And I think I did it just as good or maybe even better than he did...

Let's talk about some music now....

I have recently fallen in love with E.T. by Katy Perry...

It's from her new album Teenage Dream and it's fantastic.

The song is catchy, has powerful lyrics and a beautiful bassline.

To show how addicted I have become, I am actually listening to this song on replay while I am typing this up. 

I love the song.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxQU7fRg8xA&feature=related

Check it out and see for yourself why I'm hooked.

Until next week my friends.....

Digital editing is such a breeze

I recently attached my fingers around a beautiful copy of Adobe CS4 Master Collection which I recieved from my uncle for my birthday...

Even though I can hardly use it, I know the power of the mouse beneath my hands as its smooth motions transform the image before my eyes.

All the tools can just slice up the image before you or beautifully stylize it with a vast array of manual or automatic special effects.

We were asked to edit the pictures we took in the art studio a while aback....

With Photoshop, I gleefully went about in achieving this task.

Here are some of my edits:

Enjoy the views. These were actually realtively simple to make. I personally LOVE the last one as it seems as though the picture is constructed entirely of light...like something out of a science fiction movie.

If this is it....

Well there's a huge tropical storm in a collision course with Trinidad right now, so if you don't see any more posts after this, I'm probably either dead or lost my laptop in the storm...lol.

While we all wait it out, I'll probably be exceedingly bored when the power is cut, so I thought I'd share a few images of our lovely country in case it doesn't look that great after the storm passes.

After my last lesson in composition, you should be able to do shots like these as well.....

One of the many beautiful cathedrals of Port-of-Spain. 

Waiting for the Water Taxi at the complex in Port-of-Spain.

Water Taxi at King's Wharf in San Fernando.

The Port-of-Spain International Waterfront Complex.

Just wanted to give you all a nice little impression of how photography works. It's all ALL about lighting, steadiness of your hand and capturing the best part of your environment using the laws of composition.

Divali's coming....

Sorry for the late post...

I've been a bit delinquent when it comes to updating the blog.

Well...Divali will be soon upon us and I can't wait to get my hands on some barfi, kurma and jalebi. Mmmmm....

The lights and sounds of this time of the year will be out in full force by next week Thursday. Unfortunately, that also means my dogs will be having a hard time with all the noise from fireworks and scratch bombs...Poor things...

Now back to business....



We've been recently exploring compositional aspects of everything around us.
One way of easily spotting this is by creating a viewfinder out of literally anything.
To do this, just get something with which you can see isolated parts of your surroundings.

Another way to see this is by simple photography....

By arranging the elements of your photo correctly, beautiful compositional effects can be created.

Some samples of what can be achieved are as follows:

Note: All photos are taken with just a simple 4.0 megapixel digital camera in the Hillview College Art Studio.

After seeing what a couple of changes in materials and lighting arrangement can do...
I'm sure that the mysteries of photography and composition on the whole now seem less like big words and more like the 'ten commandments' of creating your photos, drawings, paintings etc.
The application of these skills is what separates a regular artist from a great one.

Entry 2

ARTIST’S LOG

Entry2

07/09/2010

Minimal practical work was done in today’s class due to restraints in time. However, we learnt many new theoretical aspects and guidelines by which we can improve our work, especially in the branch of graphic design such as the elements and principles of design. Exercises in balance were also conducted as seen below.

The simple geometric shape of the circle was drawn three times within a rectangular box. Each circle per box was given a different size to change the balance of the box.

Balance is affected by size, colour and placement of the object, so bigger, darker, lower objects will appear heavier while small, lightly coloured, high objects appear lighter.

The Elements of design are:

• Line                          
• Shape
• Form
• Colour                      
• Texture (tactile or visual)
• Space
• Value

The terms tactile and visual as it relates to texture refer to the use of realism or optical illusions. For example, using body paint, one can change one’s skin colour to an inhuman metallic effect detectable by the eyes, but the skin still feels normal to the touch. This can be manipulated in graphic design to achieve unique effects in relation to the piece under construction.

The Principles of design are:

·         Balance

·         Emphasis

·         Movement

·         Pattern

·         Rhythm

ARTIST'S LOG Entry1

Today on the official first day back to school for the 2010 – 2011 academic year, I was pleasantly surprised by the completion of the Hillview College art studio. In this completed studio, we now had full access to the atmosphere and special requirements for the study and improvement of our visual arts skills. We studied the area of figure drawing by learning to see beneath the skin and draw the ‘skeletal’ structure of our model. 


Our Form 4 class consists of 5 students, one of which posed as the model for our observation.

We used 14” x 17” sketch pad pages and charcoal to capture his body language and structure. Our experience in this particular area of the subject can be enhanced by experimenting with different models of differing body types, gender and using a wide variety of poses. I eagerly await our next session to see our progress in these endeavours to improve our skill.

Top: Body lines of the model in about 5 different poses.

Right: The model’s final pose in profile view.