Inspiration: AGO Field Trip

This past Thursday we went to the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) to see different forms of art that we would be doing our selves later on, like Renaissance Art. the most impressive work of art I saw was "Massacre of the Innocents" by Peter Paul Ruben oil on wood panel. the painting is portraying the biblical story of the massacring of all the boys under two years old, in Bethlehem. if you would like to see it, there is a link to a picture here on the AGO website.


Another piece of artwork that I found very impressive was a portrait by Chuck Close. He is a very realistic painter, that does mostly portraits of peoples faces. I could not fine the one that was at the AGO, but here are some other works by him. His painting was so realistic that I had to put my face right up to it to be able to see that it was a painting.

 

Tips and Tricks: Kinetic Type in Adobe AfterEffects

            I have Adobe After Effects on my computer but have never used it because I have never been able to figure it out. So I've decided to watch some tutorials on how to do different things. Here is one on kinetic type, I thought this was appropriate, because we are doing it in class right now, but in flash, which really can be annoying to use, and you can do much more complex ad cool stuff in AE. If i get time i might put up my own attempt at using AE.

Animated Poetry Analysis

The name of the poem i picked for my analysis is called minimalism. the animation done to it is kinetic typography, done in adobe after effects. the poem is about a painting that is only a white canvas, with a small black dot on it. the narrator is talking about the painting and how he doesn't think it is real art, when a janitor comes by and helps him understand the painting.

       The design in this video was a little sloppy, at times the text is over top of other text and it makes it hard to read. They also use multiple fonts at once which sometimes looks good, but in this case in some parts of the video it looks messy. There are no colors in this video other than; black, and white. the black and white goes along with the poem, which is about a white painting that has a black dot on it. The words of the first 70% percent of the poem form a black dot, that you see when it zooms out.

  

      The only audio you hear in the video is the narrator reading out the poem along with the text. the low mellow voice of the narrator went along well with the story.

      The timing of the video fluctuates throughout the video depending on what is happening during that moment in the poem. at times the voice goes too fast for the text and, you cant read what the text says because it goes by so quickly, but it goes well with the story.

     Overall I really like the poem, and I kind of like the animation that goes along with it. the poem is very creative, and i thought a bit clever. the animation was okay but could have used a little cleaning up.

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.