New Year

A new year complete with new projects. I'm going to try and archive the final months of my classes last year, but I've been very busy with making art instead of recording it!

Shadow Factory

My newest assignment is to make a sculpture that casts a shadow relating to the material of the sculpture but not obvious in sculptural form, only in the shadow. I've decided to use a battery to cast the shadow of a battery factory.



After ripping apart the battery with tweezers and gluing it all into the sculpture that forms this shadow, I saw Ed Burtynsky's "Manufactured Landscape" film with a scene where a woman in China in pulling batteries apart to pick out the heavy metals all batteries have. I hadn't realized that batteries had so much heavy metals in them - deinitely learned to be more careful with unusual materials after that.

Last Painting

I handed in my painting today without taking a photo of it... mostly because I madly finished it last night. I'm not too big on my paintings anyways.

My newest project is to take found objects such as bottles and transform them into animals. I'm thinking squid, octopi, and sea life in general.

My final pick for all of the photos. A 'dawn' look. This diorama is 100% paper and foamcore painted with acrylic and attached with hot glue. The only non-handmade part is the translucent scarf for the backdrop. The diorama is about 10' tall and 14' across.

This effect was achieved by having colored Christmas lights behind the backdrop cloth.

A 'night' scene, achieved with just light from the flashlight coming through a blue section of the background cloth.

These two are photographs of the 3-D diorama with both ambient light and directed light from a flashlight covered in cloth to soften the light and then half-covered with my hand to break up the circle.

These are photographs I've pulled from different sources to serve as inspiration for a 3-D diorama I have to build out of matboard and foamcore, paint, and photograph realistically with 1 unusual light source.

Photography Versus Other

While being both a darkroom and digital photographer is my mainstay, I have dabbled in alternative arts (mostly for my fundamental classes that force the classics upon us). Thus, much of my current works-in-progress will be drawings, paintings and 3-D objects. But do not fear! Photography is not forgotten. I'll have some fabulous shots after my Portugal photo trip coming up in a week.