Sculptures What I Done

So I'm finally putting up some of my own stuff. The following pictures are all pieces I did for my 3D Design class. Click the pictures for larger versions.

This first one isn't something I'm super impressed with, but I was limited to cardboard and wire. The project was to take those two materials, and imitate a small portion of a Kandinsky piece. This isn't too pretty, but then, neither is Kandinsky.


This second piece is not only way more interesting, but it may also still be my favorite thing I made for this class. I had a lot of fun making it, but more than that, I had a ton of fun coming up with what it was. The assignment was simple, make a creature out of found objects, and write a one page paper about what it is, where it lives, what it eats, etc... What I ended up doing was making this little creature, and writing a three page paper including multiple common names, the Latin name, regions where it lives, physical measurement averages, lifespan, basically just a whole zoological study of the thing. I'm very fond of this thing.






After that, we made a wood sculpture, which was supposed to show rhythm, tension, and release. I took the tension and release thing fairly literally. Also we had just watched a video on automata, which I've always loved, so I decided to make a simple moving piece. VERY very simple, mind you. This is just a pair of arms which stretch an elastic, pushed apart by an offset cam which is attached to a simple crank. I actually only assembled all the pieces of this today.



After the wood piece, we moved onto plaster, which is a really interesting material to work with. It's fun to carve, though I've always worked really slowly with this type of medium, and my piece is very unfinished. It still seems worth showing, though. We really had no restrictions on this piece, except that it should play with texture, and there was supposed to be a hole through it somewhere. I elected to try a piece that was a small boat being dragged down by a sea monster. I don't know why.





The final piece we did for the class was a group project in which we were to make some kind of installation piece. My group of four people split into pairs, and we decided each pair would make a giant chess piece for the checkerboard area outside the front of the main building of the school. My pair took the White King, while the other two made the Black Queen. I was insanely excited to work on this, but MAN do I wish I'd had more time to work on this. It was almost nightmarish to work on, but very rewarding and interesting. This is a wood and wire armature under a ridiculous amount of thin-set mortar. The cross is wood covered in the same stuff, and the face is carved plaster. I would LOVE to do a full set at some point.
This is the King in his spot outside the school with the Queen on the other side.

3D was a great class which I really enjoyed. Now if I can just get some illustrations up on this page.

New Direction

Lately I've been looking for directions to take my drawing, styles to experiment with, stuff like that. During my recent sketching frenzy, I found some pretty neat ways to play around with simple watercolors. I've decided that's something definitely worth looking into, but I wasn't sure what else to try, linework-wise.

Last night I went to see the movie Tangled with my girlfriend, and really enjoyed it. Sure, it's a kid-movie, and more than a little girlish, but I happen to like my fairy tales silly and lighthearted. When I'm not having them dark and messed up, anyway. The movie is insanely adorable, and very funny. It's got the feel of a good old fashioned Disney princess flick, but with a lot more modern wackiness thrown in.

More to the point, though, when we got to the end of the movie, there was an excellently drawn set of images in the ending sequence, which reminded me very pleasantly of Ronald Searle's cartoon work. I scoured the credits to find a name, and found that they had been done by someone named Shiyoon Kim. I looked him up after getting home, and found his art blog, the first post of which had some stills from the ending credits of Tangled. He seems really proud of the stuff he did for the movie, both the stuff in the credits, and the character design team he worked with. I found this all pretty exciting, even though I don't know the guy. Character design is something I would love to go into down the line, so maybe I just find it encouraging, I dunno.

A few of the stills Shiyoon Kim posted on his blog. Click the images for larger versions.



I really love what he did with the characters here, and the linework in general. It's whimsical, and playful, and a hell of a lot of fun to look at. The point is, I want to try doing some stuff a little bit more like this. I may have to pick up some new brush pens, or maybe just some ink to do brushwork with. One of my brush pens is dead, and the one I picked up at the beginning of the semester has disappeared on me.

Anyway, I'll be trying a few things later on, after or in between doing some class work. Since I'll be near a scanner I may actually be able to put something of mine on this blog.

Shiyoon Kim's Art Blog