Work from. . . . . . . . School!

 In my senior year curriculum, I signed up to take Boston Latin School's Foundations of the Visual Arts class, where we will be creating art using all sorts of different mediums this year.  It is the last week of October, 2008, and here are some of the things we have already worked on in class.

 Our very first project was to create and cut out a stencil to use.  I decided to do an octupus, since I figured it would be challenging to work with so curvy an animal.  In designing the stencil, I took the image of an octopus from an aquarium website and played around with it in photoshop until it was divided into black and white.  I made three different layers, more apparent in the red and yellow octopus, to give it a little more depth: the bottom color, the top, and pieces of the first color that had to be cut out of the octopus to make the second layer.  The backgounds in both pictures were made using watered-down acrylics, and the bubbles were made using the bottom of a paint dish for the circle, and then the shine was painted in.  The bubbles were actually afterthoughts, put in to fill in space, but I really like how they seem to compliment the pictures.

 In class, there were setups of white blocks and other 3-D shapes, and we were given black and white charcoal to draw the scene with.  The was a singular light source, and the shapes were placed on top of a cleared white surface, and we were told to focus more on the shading in the scene than the geometry of the shapes.  I had never really worked in detail with charcoal before, let alone shading with it.