Artistic Inspiration

This week i found a website for a magazine that has all kinds of inspiring artworks. (click here to view website) There is everything from paintings, to computer made artworks. The one shown below is the one i found most inspiring. It is very abstract and there is so much in it, there are random shapes, lines, parts of creatures, and objects, and just about anything you can find or visualise in it. I really like this form of art because it is very free  and there aren't any rules as to how things need to look. it is really colourful and there is so much to look at and it is a very complex piece of art. I think that i might try and make my own piece of art similar to this to see how good I'am at it.

The Missing Pages in Canadian History Research

The Black Loyalists

·      Located in Birchtown, Nova Scotia

·      Started out with the founding of the neighboring town “Shelburne” in may, 1783

·      The group that founded Shelburne consisted of 936 freed slaves, followed by a lager group of black loyalist emigrants on August 27, 1783

·      The loyalists were runaway slaves who were in search of protection from the British that served the loyalist cause

·      by the fall of 1784 the population of Birchtown grew to 1,521

·      and was the largest settlement of free blacks

·      Birchtown was said to have been 13 acres but was probably more like 400

·      Birchtown was home to many people that are famous to Nova Scotian history, like colonel Stephen Blucke, who was the leader of the black loyalists

The Maroons (fugitive runaway)

·      As early as 1512, black slaves escaped from Spanish and Portuguese captors, and joined indigenous, or made a living on their own

·      the runaway slaves formed their own communities in Jamaica, and nanny town

·      when the slaves came together to fight for their independence they were called Maroons

The coal mine workers

·      the earliest coal mining in America with any commercial significance involved slaves working in the coal pits, in Richmond, Virginia. in the mid 1700’s

·      mining companies such as the black heath company, and  Chesterfield coal , employed hundreds of slaves and free blacks

The black car porters

-   in 1925, was the first labor organization led by blacks to receive a charter in the American federation of labor
-in 1978 they joined with the brotherhood of airline and railway clerks, and are now know as the Transportation Communications International Union

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Artistic Inspiration

I found this artist that makes art on dirty car windows. I found this really inspiring because normally if your car was dirty you would wash it, but this person thought of the dirt differently and decided to do drawings in it. By wiping more dirt of in the darker parts and leaving more dirt on in the lighter parts. To get the tones in between the dark and the light shades, he wiped out tiny bits of the dirt, to give it a darker gray color. There are a tone of different pieces he has done, you can see some of them down below, or you came see them all on his website Here. To make these pieces of art he first used his finger but then started to use his paint brushes. Not only has he done this art on cars but he has done it on glasses, and done big dirt murals on store windows.

he has also played a role in a music video 

Realistic Drawing

The last couple of weeks we worked on realistic drawings of still life. We spent the first week of our realistic drawing we practice by drawing; bear, coyote, and dear skulls that we have in the class.   Something that I found really tricky about this project was getting the shading to be clean, so that you couldn’t see all the lines. Fix that I had to keep going over all the shaded parts really lightly with my pencil till those lines disappeared. Also when I was drawing it was really hard to keep the side of my hand from smudging the graphite, so to solve that problem I put a piece of paper under my hand so that I could rest my hand down on the page and keep it from smudging. I was really impressed with it in the end. It was by far the best realistic drawing I have ever done. I think that it was a very good composition; the lights and darks are not totally even so that it doesn’t look to even. Over all I was very impressed with my work on this project, if I could do it again I would have a piece of paper under my hand to keep the whole project smudge free.

Technical and Artistic Reflection

Kinetic Typography

Jesse Sanderson

For the kinetic typography project, I did a scene someone made out of different clips from Napoleon Dynamite the 2004 movie directed by Jared Hess, about a bunch off losers in high school, trying to be accepted as them selves.  I made it in Adobe Flash CS4, using adobe after affects would have been a better program to use, but flash is what we were assigned to use. I used a font I found online that was used a lot in the movie, called 3Dumb. Napoleon uses a font like this in all the drawings he did in the movie, so I thought it would be a good font to use. Also the background I used was the same wallpaper used on the walls of Napoleon Dynamite’s house.

 When I created my storyboard and chose my font, my goal was to make it really cheesy, so that it would go well with the theme of the movie. If I could redo the project I would probably change some of the transitions so that they are less repetitive. Something that I’m proud of is how close it was to what I had planned on my story board, and how well it portrays the mood of the movie. Something that I found really frustrating with flash was tweens, tweens are the steps that take something from one position to another. What was really hard about the tweens was getting them to work properly, without glitching and not transforming properly. Whenever I was having a problem with a tween, I would keep going over it and tweaking it till I got it right. (sorry about the bad video and audio quality)

Personal Inspiration

Yesterday we went to the Tim Burton art gallery a lot of his artwork really inspired me. well i was there all I wanted to do was to sit down and  creepy looking characters like the one he has created. Like stain boy or  stare girl. I found his art really inspiring because it is so different from art you usually see, and it is such an interesting an unique style. all of his work is so creative, and simple but very well thought out.

Flash Tutorial

This video really helped me with the all the flash projects I did. I found it was very straight forward and easy to follow.