When I was 5, (photos of some of my tree/plant studies)

During the process of my first piece I observed about every tree around the art building, I also did some observing outside of class. I tried finding trees that were both interesting and simply, I wanted to capture the essence of the outdoors, that I so enjoyed drawing when I was younger. From my list of 25 one that I chose was the memory of learning how to draw a tree. My Dad was always a bit of an artist, he never went to school for it or anything but he had a lot of natural ability. He just knew how to draw things, and he enjoyed doing it as a hobby. When I was five I remember my dad drawing and I tried copying him, to my dismay my drawing was no where close to his. I quickly became very frustrated, I couldn't understand why his drawing was so much nicer then mine.
My dad saw how irritated I had become, and he ask me if i needed help. Well I was a stubborn child and quickly turned down his offer, acting like I knew exactly what I was doing. After a couple more failed attempts at drawing a tree, I finally gave in and ask my Dad for Help. This was my first real brush with art, It was The first time I really tried putting effort towards a drawing, and it is still one of my fondest memories. Here I have included some of the photos of trees and plants I took to help me with this project.

My artistic inspiration

              

           When we got this project asking us to list 25 things that shaped us as an artist, many different memories started coming back to me.  The memory that came to the fore front of my mind was when my mom bought me this clay book.  When I was in second grade we had a book fair at my school, my mom knew i was kind of into drawing and crafts so she picked me up a copy.  When she gave it to me I didn't think to much of it, until a little later on when i started flipping through the pages.  Once I started seeing all the different clay creations in the book I was hooked. For some reason I became so fascinated with all that you could do with clay.  

       I began to try to make the objects in the book, the first one I can remember was this sumo wrestler guy.  I started carrying clay with me everywhere, which turned out to a little bit of a problem.  My mom for some reason didn't like this mobilization of clay, probably because it started showing up in my  pants pockets along with the wash, and in the carpet at home.  I always reminded my mom it was her fault for buying the book, that didn't go over so well either.  I really have to give credit to my mom and this book, because if I never had received  the book I'm not sure if I would have pursued art.  I just know that once I got into clay modeling I really started enjoying art.  Before I kind of liked art,  just drawing doodles like every kid does, but this seemingly small thing( a Clay book bought at a book fair) created in me a love for art.

Value Drawings

Since we are working with value I thought it might be helpful to have some inspiration. I went out and found some still life value drawings, that I felt captured space with value. Each of the value drawings makes you feel that there is space in front of and all around the objects. Like the quadrant feel, we tried to achieve through the field of depth project, these drawings are doing the same thing but with regular values. You feel like you can divide up the drawings into sections as it goes back into space. I think that's the main goal with our value drawings -- to define an object's place in space through value. A few of these drawings are examples of the style Trompe l'oeil (which means 'to fool the eye'). I feel like this style really grasps what we are after, because the shading and technique creates this extremely effective 3-D depth to the drawing. The values tell you where every object is living, and the space is so effective you almost want to push the object out of the way to see what is behind it. 

Quotes

Here are just a few quotes and pics by Giacometti i found interesting

 Sorry it came out so small I was having some technical difficulty, if you click on the quotes a bigger page will come up 

so you can actually read them!