Matt Smith...

Looks better with eyebrows geckos

Sure, I could have turned a tongue into a frog, but I think Matt Smith needed some friends.

Sands Again

Sort of. Not really.

I enjoyed Art II so much that I really wanted to get into another art class for second semester. Unfortunately my second period block was taken and Mr. Sands' third period computer art and animation was full. With a photoshop-enabled laptop and a free period I let myself into his classroom.

I'm not in the class, but I'm also not not in it. This will be fun.

Whales

I like whales. Not sure why. But it's a thing.

I drew this during English class the first semester of my sophomore year. Ever since then, I've drawn whales on everything. I use 'improbablewhale' as a username for youtube and a lot of other things. The biggest thing was turning the whales into .gif animations and plushies.

All of these were hand drawn, anywhere from two to ~50 frames.

Weekend Projects: Dollar Store Mug

Title says it all. It's a thing I'm gonna start doing. (Technically I started last week but I also did a mug last week so I didn't want to do a double mug weekend.)

Yesterday I took my brother and his friend to see Thor 2 (great movie) and as usual we stopped by the dollar store to pick up some candy on the cheap. I saw this mug which had a removable paper insert that could be traced and redrawn to whatever the mug-user wanted the mug to sport. I found some shiny acrylic red paint and fun little embellishments to create a santa-esque mug to cart my coffee to school with me. It didn't take long at all.

This would actually be a great project for kids to do. I think if they were given pre-cut templates, paint, glitter, all that other dangerous stuff small children love, they'd be set to make some pretty cute Christmas presents for their parents.

Frankie

Somewhere in the midst of the Antelope travesty, Mr. Stapleton had our English class start reading Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. It was one of those things that I had always intended to do, but never actually got around to doing. There was going to be some Franken-art at some point.

For a while, this was the only thing to come out of it.

Don't get me wrong, I was certainly proud of my seascape of Captain Robert Walton's ship on the fore edge of my personal copy of Frankenstein, but it wasn't  as over-the-top as I knew I could be. Luckily I finished the gilded antelope soon after and a new project was assigned.

Do a portrait. Use a strange material. Go.

I realize that felt and thread and poly-fill aren't that out-there of a material to use, but I thought it fit for what I was going for. Victor Frankenstein sutured up his creature out of bits-o-cadavers, making a grotesque, smelly, literally larger-than-life man-baby. I was going to make an adorable, hand-embroidered, baby-eyed, creature for Victor to love and hug and call his own.

He is pretty cute.

I spent a lot of time making sure his scars and stitches looked exceedingly Frankensteinian.

I couldn't really just have Frankenstein's creature sitting alone with no context, so I decided to craft a table for him to be experimented upon. I like working with wood. However, I'm used to using bigger and thicker pieces, so assembling the table with just hot glue was kind of difficult. Staining it was important to me because I imagined an extravagant table with brass fittings that Victor may have inherited from his mother. I don't know why, but the details meant something to me. 

The brass was SO fun to work with. I have a tendency to try new materials and have it work out pretty well for me. I was left with so much after making the corner brackets that I ended up making braces for the creature to restrain him on the table.

(Mr. Sands was really upset that he wasn't green or had bolts in his neck.)

The amount of construction involved in this project was incredible. My portrait of Frankenstein's monster turned into a scale scientific table with a contrasting supposed 'monster' trying to escape. 

There's no room in my house for any more art projects.

Author's note: I apologize for the excessive use of hyphens. I would change some sentence structure but I like it so too bad.

Surprise! 

Guess what I'm making next?