Week of 5/2

Hi All,
This week your homework is to choose a famous or infamous person, and then make a self-portrait (a picture of you) as that person!

• Your drawing must be an honest attempt to make a realistic likeness--no cartoon versions of yourself--with believable light and shadow.  
• For this drawing to be considered successful, it must clearly be you and it must clearly be the famous person you chose.  How exactly you do it is entirely up to you as long as you can successfully argue that you followed the assignment.  
• Your drawing must fill a sketchbook page and 
• you must consider the background as carefully as the figure.  

Have fun and good luck!

Week of 4/25

Hi All,
This week in your sketchbooks you are to do basically what we did in class, only you are to substitute your facial features for the ones you copied off the board.  In other words, you are to make a self portrait in acrylic paint.

Start out by mixing any neutral tone/color and cover your entire paper with it.  Once it's dry you can use pencil or thinned out paint on top of it to lay out the proportions.  Then--and this is the hard part--fill in the lights, middle tones, and shadows using any mixed colors necessary.  You can try to be realistic or you can keep it mostly about tone.  The key for this week is to make sure the tones/values work well.  Lights. Middle tones. Darks.

Set up in an area with strong light.  You are to include the entire face in realistic proportions and detail (no cubism or surrealism).  Try to think about the face as simply a set of architectural planes. All the planes receiving light directly from the source are the lights, the planes receiving light obliquely are the middle tones, and the planes facing away from the light are the darks.  Include the hair, but treat it as a collection of lights and darks, not as hair as such.  One last thing: don't forget the tone of the negative space!

Week of 4/18

Okay, I'm baaaack!  It was good to see you all (well, most of you) this morning!  You'll recall we made cubist portraits of each other.  What is the difference between a cubist portrait and regular realist portrait?  Shallow space, geometric decomposition, rearranging elements, etc.
This week in your sketchbooks you are to make either a cubist self portrait, or a surrealist self portrait.  If you have questions about what makes either, google is your friend!!!  Below are a few examples.

Cubism:

Surrealism:

Week of 3/21

Hi All,
Firstly, remember that next Monday we will NOT have class as it's the day after Easter.  I'll see you in two weeks.
You Homework:
You are to make a cubist picture of a man or woman playing an instrument of some kind.  Remember that Cubism completely blots out the traditional notion of the illusion of space.  Cubism tends to look shattered and shallow spaced with few forms closer or further away that any others.  Use any color palette you'd like.  Borrow from the greats like Picasso, Gris, and Braque.  Make your own pictures, but it's not cheating to borrow their ideas and morph them into your own!  Your picture should be in acrylic and should fill a sketchbook page.
Good luck!
PS-it should take at least a couple of hours.

Week of 3/7

Hi All,
So this week you are finishing the cubist painting that you started in class.  Finishing just means that you are editing out any details you don't need and adding color to it--but not too much.  Below are some example images of Analytic Cubism that might help.  Notice that the space in these paintings is very shallow, and the color is not terribly rich or extensive.  Lots of browns and grays.

Week of 2/29

Hi All,
This week you are to look up and remember Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans.  For him, the Campbell's Soup Can was cheap, mundane, ubiquitous and easily recognizable, and therefore a stand-in for any consumer product in the home.
You are to choose an object that is a consumer product that does the same thing for our time.  Use the adjectives above as criteria for you object.  Then you are to paint you object en masse in a grid arrangement like he did, illustrating that your object is mass produced.  Your image should fill your paper and be at least 4 grids deep and 3 grids wide.  Have fun and good luck!

Week of 2/22

Hi All,
New Subject.  Pop Art and Logos.  Your job this week that we started in class is to design three logos that might be combinations of other logos.  See if you can choose to combine logo designs that make an interesting combo platter.  Or not.
What makes a good logo you ask?  Simplicity.  Keep your lines/edges clean.  Every logo is self contained.  It is not cropped.  It must be at home on the side of a bus, a notebook, a helmet.  It has a limited color scheme.  No more than three colors so as to be easily reproducible.
Because it is such a simple (as in the opposite of complicated) design, whatever is left after editing out all the unnecessary stuff is that much more important.  Spend enough time deciding exactly where each curve and point will be.  Designers can spend hours agonizing over the placement and proportion of a single shape.  Be willing to make a logo the best way, not merely a pretty good way.

Week of 2/15

Hi Everyone,
This week you will be not so much drawing or painting as making.  As we discussed in class, you are to make a surrealistic object that undermines or subverts itself.  Daniel's cactus chair is a great example, or the soccer cleats with the studs inside the shoe instead of outside, or Meret Oppenheim's furry tea service (http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/meret-oppenheim-object-paris-1936).

Whatever you choose, try to make a thing in an interesting or poetic way, instead of the easiest way.  If you find that you can't actually make your idea (but it is possible to make), make a painting of it to show us your idea.  Here's an example: The Dufala Bros. "Hair Burger."

  Good luck!

Week of 2/8

Hi All,
As you know, you are to design and execute a surrealist painting in your sketchbooks.  Remember the Exquisite Corpse exercise.  Put together disparate objects or parts of objects.  Use your ideas that you came up with during class, or if you've brainstormed better ones since, feel free to use them.  Look at the links posted previous, and use google (!) to find more artists that could be called surrealists.  Borrow ideas from other artists--it's NOT cheating!

Week of 2/1

Hi All,
Apologies for not posting soon, but as you'll remember from out class discussion, you are to design a Surrealist painting.  The Surrealists loved the juxtaposition of randomness and unrelated objects interacting in a way that becomes a bit unsettling.  Remember that Mad Libs is children's version of the Exquisite Corpse game, which in many ways is Surrealism in a nutshell.  Here are some links to major Surrealist Artists.  On each page, scroll down for links to lots of images:

Salvador Dali: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/dali_salvador.html
Rene Magritte: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/magritte_rene.html
Ives Tanguy: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/tanguy_yves.html
Max Ernst: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/ernst_max.html
Giogio De Chirico: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/de_chirico_giorgio.html

Week of 1/18

Hi All,
This week your homework is to finish making a careful pencil copy of your Abts/Nozkowski painting.  Every square inch of the drawing should be considered.  Be sure not to merely sketch in the composition.  This should take at least a couple hours.

Use both hard and soft pencils to build up the layers to get a beautifully rich and painterly surface. Don't mash down the tooth of the paper. Instead use a hard pencil in all different directions to fill in the white spaces that the valleys of the tooth of the paper make.

In the end, your drawing should look EXACTLY like a black and white photo of the painting.

Week of 1/4

Hi all,
As you know, your homework this week is to finish the canvas board paintings we started in class: the Tom Nozkowski and Tomma Abts hybrid.  Your painting should be perfectly (but asymmetrically) balanced using moves from both Abts's and Nozkowski's arsenal.  Most importantly everything square inch of the painting should be considered and finished in the most appropriate way possible.

Do not make decisions based on expediency or efficiency. If it takes twice as long to make a painting that is 5% better, then it's worth the time and effort.  Period.

Good luck!