Auntpurple

I chose a portrait of my Aunt Sandra because she is very special to me.  We have always been close for as long as I can remember and I love spending time with her. I thought of a few different materials to use for this like, makeup, glass, and leaves,  but the idea that I like the best was melted crayons. The crayons were harder to use that I first thought they would be,  but they added a great texture to the peice that I couldn't have done with other materials. Some things I did to make this portrait more untraditional was using more cool colors like blue and different purples,  another thing that made this different from other was I didn't put her facial features in the portrait,  I made her so you could see where she was like the original picture,  but without a face.  I felt that no fave would leave my peice open for interpretation. One challenge i faced was the wax,  when I first started using it I was melting it in a spoon and the texture was very rough making the look awkward,  but I was able to overcome this by using a wood burner to smooth everything out.  When I decided to use the wood burner to smooth it out it gave the piece a more human feel,  but leaving out the facial features gave it almost a lost feeling making you wonder why I left it out,  it makes you wonder if she was happy,  sad,  scared, or mad,  leaving it more open to think what you want about her. The materials I chose didn't have any connection to my aunt, but I incorporated some of her favorite colors in the piece.

Snails

For my "Sticky Situation" project I tried to think of many different things that could be thought of as sticky, one of the first ideas I came up with was to paint the earth and have buildings sticking out of it hence the sticky situation,  then I found a picture that I took of some snails on a sea wall, I really wanted to do this since it was more personal,  I took the picture and now I get to paint it. The first idea I had was the buildings "stuck" in the earth I thought    this was different and showed a new perspective on the earth.  To incorporate the repetition I painted eight snails a few with the same colors o give it the pattern.  I chose acrylic because you can layer it more than water colors and I like the way thick layers look on the canvas.  One problem I did run into  was I couldn't get the shadows dark enough since I watered down the black paint,  but in the end it worked out. The mini lessons helped me find the right media,  and helped me discover that I'm not very good with water colors. 

Kitty

For this project I looked on pinterest to get some ideas when I saw a picture of a white cat with blue eyes,  I thought this would be perfect for this project.  To demonstrate emphasis on the cat I used some dark blue, light blue, white,  light green,  and even purple. This really brought emphasis to the cats eyes. I chose to used pastel pencils for this project since the pencil had more control over it.  I also love the way the pastels would blend with each other.  This really helped my peice because I was able to add colors that I wouldn't normally put in to add depth to the cat's face. For me a risk I took was using purple on the WHITE cat! This scared me since I tend to stay away from darker colors,  but in the end it turned out really well. I felt that my project had a very good technique,  especially with the cat's fur since this took so long.

Shoes!

Some solutions I had to Whats the Point were to think of things that were obvious, and then go into more detail with them.  When I thought of shoes I thought of how I could look at them from different angles. I chose to draw the heels from the backside to give you that different perspective. To show contrast I made the background of my picture darker and the shoes lighter,  but I also had to think about how the light would show up on the back of the shoes. I used pencils for my medium because I felt it would be better for shading the shoes