Up Close and Personal

Oh my goodness this freaking plane.

As soon as I heard the prompt for the first project, I knew what I would do. That was not true in this case. "Up close and personal" he said. "Repetition" he said. Nope. Nothing. God I was upset. I can't even remember any of my original ideas because those first few days were so absent of thought I've just blocked them out of my memory at this point. But then, the plane.

The Cessna 172 is the most-produced plane on the market. As an aspiring pilot, I've been a fan of the personal aircraft for a while. I doodle them in my spare time, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to paint it, right?

Ugh. 

I had only painted one other thing in my life-- the landscape we all did in art one. While painting a landscape wasn't too much of a challenge for me, painting a metal aircraft in flight with the correct shading and highlights was proving to be quite the endeavor.

Once I got base layers of paint down, it was apparent that this was going to be exceedingly cartoonish. At that point I couldn't change it, so I had to just come to terms with it.

And then, of course, we have the potatoes. The Friday after the project was assigned, Ms. Sudkamp's class was making potato stamps. I, being the six-year-old that I am, started nagging Mr. Sands for a potato and some carving tools. 

This was the result. And, being the six-year-old that I am, was quite proud.

The potato evolved into this stamp made of 1 cm thick craft foam, which was used to cover the painting in hundreds of multicolored planes. 

That got tedious really fast.

In the end, I'm really happy with the result. I'm thrilled with the story book-ish style and I think I did okay for something that wasn't a bunch of trees or mountains.