Blog Feed

For this course, my class was tasked with creating 5 core pieces of artwork. The themes of these assignments were a ceiling tile, charcoal still life, jack-o-lantern, self portrait, and painting or drawing of your choosing. Going through this project I wanted to express my emotions a little bit more and show how i feel when I'm not a around everyone else. My focus for most of these projects was to carry a message through every art piece I created. As a result of this I was able to find myself in the things I decided to create.

My favorite pieces in this collection would have to be Sleeping socialite and my Hello! X - RAY. These, though they might not seem like it, were inspired by what I actually find interesting about the world. I find it amazing how social media can enhance and discard beauty. It is a vessel that disconnects you from your surrounding but connects you to the world. In Sleeping Socialite, the girl is sleeping or closing her eyes to the world around her, pressing the dislike button on it so that she explore the world inside the internet. For Hello! X - RAY is more a piece that shows that we are all the same on the inside. Hello Kitty is an icon and seen as more important than the other characters in her line, just like how celebrities are seen as superior. I believe that no matter how different someone is, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, or social status, we are all the same.

Art 2, the second class of art offered at Science Leadership Academy is all about the deeper exploration of the different types of visual arts. This year, we started off the by getting an overview of all the pieces we were doing and all the options we had for each piece. For each piece there were three options for the workload that you wanted. They were Passive, for the student who was in the class just because, Middle for students who are interested in art but not sure if they want to pursue futures in art, and the Future Art Student which is pretty self explanatory.

The First assignment was to do either a ceiling tile painting or 5 contour line drawings. I personally chose the contour line drawings because I prefer drawing over other mediums of art. My first drawing is a contour drawing of a paintbrush. You can tell it is a contour line drawing because there is no shadow. The shadow is expressed with thicker lines which make the line drawing more dynamic. My second drawing is of a skull, the third is of a pencil on paper, the fourth is of an eraser on pencil, and the final contour line drawing is of one of my icons, Luka Sabbat. The process of the line drawing was pretty easy and I did not have any real changes to any ideas that I came up with.

The second assignment of the quarter was a free drawing assignment. This assignment allowed the student to draw or paint whatever they liked. Me, since I am personally an anime fan decided to draw one of the most famous anime characters of all time, Son Goku. This drawing was especially difficult because of the amount of shading that had to be done. Drawings of Dragon Ball Z characters are usually very detailed and I wanted to capture the detail as well, therefore this drawing took me a pretty long time due to the detail that I decided to add to it. But overall I could say that I enjoyed doing this drawing the most because I had the freedom to draw what I wanted.

The assignment after this was a Halloween based assignment. I decided to do a middle student assignment for this one which was design and create a jack-o-lantern in any medium. My jack-o-lantern is not a realistic jack-o-lantern but more of a spooky cartoon type jack-o-lantern. I chose to do this because I thought that I would enjoy the drawing process more than having to worry about getting every single detail correct if drawing realistically.

The final assignment for this quarter was a self portrait. This is really where I wanted to get creative and I took the term self portrait and twisted it... Combining my ideas with ideas of other artists whose work I enjoy. For example, my self portrait is a dark and twisted sketch of me from another fantasy type world. This sketch is heavily influenced by George Condo who is known for his creepy but beautiful portraits of strange characters. This was by far my favorite sketch to do because I was able to use ideas from famous artists and incorporate their art styles into my self portrait.

As an artist I created all my art based off of the things that I like, which range from music to my favorite cartoon characters. My art shows a piece of my personality, I am very child like but I also like the older of things life such as boomboxes and tapes.  I tried to incorporate myself in all of the art so that it would have a personally and passionate aspect to the art. Much of my artwork was inspired by things I would see and think of through my everyday life.​

My art used two mediums paint and colored pencils to add more life and creativity to the art. I would like to expand my mediums even though these two mediums are my favorite. I love art I think it is beautiful what a person can create and what that can mean to them. Even when something is perfect it is your creation that can be something beautiful and that's what I learned in the first quarter.

In the beginning of the quarter I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for my pieces or what I wanted my pieces to convey but as I worked through all of the assignments I learned more about myself as an artist. When actually sitting down to work on a piece I found it wasn’t that difficult to be inspired. I would just look around me and see something that inspired me or I would think about something happening my life and would be inspired. I found that I didn’t have to know what I wanted a piece to symbolize before I started working on it but that I would find what it symbolized by working on it.

I collaborated on the ceiling tile with Kiamesso DaSilva. Initially, we wanted to paint steps, which would be inscribed with words in Arabic which would translate to “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” leading up to a golden door. In the background there would be swirls and other similar decorations. We decided a ceiling tile would not be the best medium to create this and decided instead to do ceiling tile inspired by sari patterns. We decided on painting a big pearly white swirl that would take up to tiles and decorate the edges around the swirl with small dots and other shapes to create an intricate border for the swirl. We chose to use cool, light colors for our piece because we wanted it to seem wintery. My favorite season is winter and we wanted the piece to remind people of snow and ice and the winter in general.

For the choose your own drawing assignment I chose to draw my cat. I adopted my cat just two weeks before I started on the assignment so I was feeling very inspired by her and I was very excited to draw her. In my drawing I wanted to capture my cat’s calmness and serenity and inspire a sense of serenity and peace in others. I also wanted my piece to express my love and appreciation for her.

For my jack-o-lantern I decided to carve Hogwarts. When I was younger I loved the Harry Potter books. I thought it would be fun to carve a castle and decided I would do Hogwarts. It was a lot harder than I expected it to be but I enjoyed the process and I am pretty proud of the final result. I wanted to piece to remind people of their childhood and the books they read and loved. To carve the castle I printed out a simple drawing of Hogwarts and taped it onto my pumpkin. Then I used a pumpkin carving knife to cut along the edges until I had the shape I wanted. After that I drew in a few details with a sharpie.

“Hey that's mines!”

I looked over at my squabbling classmates. Without thinking I interrupted.

“Actually it would be ‘mine’ not ‘mines’.”

They stared at me. I flushed and returned to my book, regretting my outburst.

This kind of interaction has happened to me many times throughout my life. As I got older I started ignoring incorrect grammar as I discovered slang. I did not want to be labeled ‘grammar Nazi’ or be considered stuck up. It made me feel like how I spoke was too different and wrong.

When I was younger, I used larger and more complicated words than kids my age. I was shy, so I didn't talk to my peers. I did not have many friends at school because all my buddies lived farther away. This situation made me feel separated from my classmates. Instead, I would sit with the adults and listen to the things I didn’t understand, but gave me a feeling of importance. I felt that if I wanted to talk with the grownups, I would need a bigger vocabulary; I looked in dictionaries and watched documentaries to sound older and more knowledgeable. This detached me from my classmates even more; they did not like how I spoke and I did not like how they spoke. Looking Back, it was not very important for me to correct them, because that was their environment showing through. If I did not want them judging me for how I communicated, then I should not have judged them for it.

I have been told that my West Philly accent is not very strong, even though that is where I was raised. I do not use most Philadelphia slang as my parents never used it. My Mom grew up in Louisiana and my Dad is from New Jersey. They both have subtle accents, and their language style has impacted some of how I speak. I believe my way of speaking is a blend of my parents and the area I grew up in.

This does not mean that my dialect never changes. My location can affect how I speak to others. Like most students, I am more respectful in my speech at home. I do not curse, and I use proper sentences and grammar. At school I tend to be more loose tongued, louder and willing to use slang or inappropriate language with my peers. This also happens in other environments; when I visit my friends in South Philly, my words slur together subconsciously. I adapt to the dialect like Slyar from Heroes or Absorbing Replication. For this to happen I do not even have to leave my house. I have found that if I when I watch a show from a different region, I also pick up a bit of that dialect shown on the show. The first time I noticed it was when after watching seven or more Doctor Who episodes in a row, when I spoke to my sister, I used some of the jargon from the show. This confused me and my own way of speaking sounded strange after.

My dialect is not incorrect because it is not the typical way of speaking for where I live. It can show how I was raised and what influences me. Just because someone else's accent differs from mine, does not mean that one of us is superior to the other. My dialect is mine, and everyone else has their own. You can learn a lot from someone from how they communicate; they may fall into a stereotype or they could be completely different. If your going to judge, do it by who they are, not what they sound like.