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This is kind of what helped me get the old artist ball rolling, along side with the visit to the Field Museum and touring the Evolving Planet Exhibit. Now some of those creatures might change to something more in line with what science and history tells us, but we'll see.

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Now with the musical layers plastered (or glued) on top, and the guy sticked on, this is what I've finished with and presented. Each of the various abstract objects are representing how I viewed each of the various instruments within my piece. I thought that a common complaint would be that there seems to be no central focus, nothing that your eyes just gets drawn back to. Well, for those that believe so, my response is that it sounds like a person is sweating and hysterical, like being extremely nervous or out running in a heatwave. But either way, when you're that mentally exhausted, your mind will try to be play tricks on what you see and you end up seeing like stuff like this. But some of their placement was decided so that the instrument pieces are interacting with him, like orange zig-zag to his neck, representing the prominent violin of the track, or the little, flat, yellow crescents over his chest to represent the sound of marching drums. I think that the person being fairly translucent paid off since it wasn't too light that I can't make out the figure, but not too deep that I can't see the objects. Certainly some things are still bugging me like a glue marks on the head and some pieces not actually glued down, but I guess its stable enough and they'll probably look worse with a glue bottle. But that said, if someone has some suggestions for improve it, I'll take it and consider, assuming it isn't overkill with the time we have.

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Thumbnails, I don't usually do these actually, I just wait for inspiration to hit me from the blue and roll with it. Well in any case, for our next project using the element of fragmentation, I took the time to make some. The top one is a chain of life-forms from about 300+ million years ago to now with humans, all corresponding to the mass extinction eras. To fit with the theme, I thought that the creatures behind the human should be fading away, with the one furthest behind the most faded, and everyone's remittences would be floating away like ashes in the air. The face portrait is supposed to be a jumble of various iconic face features from various sources of media, like the Joker's smile or Pinocchio's nose, then broken up to show sudden morphing of the face. And the Bottom one is a guy getting sucked through to the cyber world and becomes a Pixel based version of himself. In the end, I chose the top one and decided that a.) It was not going to be as wide as the thumbnail suggests. b.) I'd use the Chalk Pastel and Charcoal like from the the Intro into music drawing, and c.) that each lifeform would have their own background with color to bring more life than just the a solid color. And for the record, ignore about everything else not mentioned above.

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So here's about a few days worth of work on the extinction project and got half of the cast outlined. Compared to the thumbnail, you can see the third one changed to be more fitting with what history says and actually offers at the moment. Don't ask for names, I just draw, not really my business at the moment to know who they are. But researching them has given me ideas of how to draw their background, like the third one is one that ate fish and other sea life, so I drew a rough shore line. This one beast in particular was about the size of a pig, so I made the tree look larger to emphasize it's size. That's your update, see you next friday. B^)

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Looks like it's done, and compared the version from the monday after break, it looks improved in a subtle way. Before, the reflection in where the water is looked just like the land, trees and bushes in all. But it looked more like a mirror reflection as apposed to a water reflection, so I went for some help. My group suggested to either add gloss, or to add more characteristics of water, like ripples and distortion of the images. However, the latter seemed too difficult to accomplish, as the picture there was already settled and it couldn't be morphed into something else, so I went with the former, but this didn't really help much either, only adding a shine, but no light hue, which is ultimately what it needed as I stood back and viewed it from a distance. So, using a combo of white and blue, and like one, light dap at the paint and try to even spread that bit of paint around a section of the reflection. Rinse and Repeat until the entire the water is covered. In addition, to differentiate the water from the earth, so the shore was given a dark brown color to look like dirt/mud next to a watery bed. And with that, I just hanged it up. Oh, and I took this during 8th hour open and it was still in the case, so that other stuff merged with it are just photos from the other side. Even my macbook makes a guest star appearance.

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This is the picture in progress from about 2 weeks ago, with still like half the picture still blank in color. At this point, you can see I just started getting into the back, working mainly on the grass. The front of the piece being the gravel road in contact with the luscious green hill. The water reflection was also dealt with by giving it sky coloring, as well as the other side's sky peeping out the top right. The black-like object is supposed to look somewhat green to resemble a bush, but probably it doesn't show up that great on this photo.

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Work-in Progress #1 (Color Theory x Botanical Garden)

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Work-in Progress #1 (Color Theory x Botanical Garden)

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Apologies for those who can't see the pencil outline, I didn't know how well this would show and I feared ripping through it done any harder. But moving, heres the Japanese Garden pencil sketch... on a canvas. On it will go the oil paint, which is a first time for me and in addition to working with reflections, specifically water reflections. I tried my best to make the water reflect the surface and tried to make the very large blobs of leaves and trees look real beyond the camera lens. To say the least, I think it'll look better once painted on and in fact, I'm starting it as of NOW! YOU CAN'T STOP ME!

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Heres a quick view of the Japanese Garden at the Chicago Botanical Garden from more or less a year ago for a school Field trip. I Like the view because it reminded me of a golf course and while I'm not particularly good at golf, the environment is relaxing and soothing that it just triggers something in me. Interestingly, if the photo is enlarged to an extent, it looks like a watercolor painting, with the smears and blobs. Anyway, this'll be my Subject for our color theory

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Here are some practice with the oil paint, after learning not to use too much water on it. I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

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Admittedly, the actually piece is fairly blank, but the idea here of using the surface of the paper as a foreground element just captivates me, like here with the cat climbing the bars of the lined-papers like stairs. Its just a creative way to use another piece of paper.

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Another sort of biased piece, because of my passion for video games, but that in itself is something that attributes to me drawing. Based the Zelda game, The Wind Waker, with its simple cell-shading design and overly cartoony character, Its transition from electronic to paper just fits and, to me, has a special charm. For the record, the rest of the book is actually black-and-white.

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I feel like there might be a bias going on when I see this picture, but really, I just like the composition of how our organs and whatnot are like plants. Seeing the veins of the heart spawn from the inside like roots for a tree in a seed just makes sense.

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Here's the background of the piece, full of warm red, orange, and yellow, with an almost a glossy finish. This is going to be the symbolic representation of the overall mood of the music, Frantic and Nerve-racking. Kind of looks like a Beatles Album when I see this now, not that it was of any inspiration. It was a bit of a deboggle, trying to get this out line on this paper, but a simple use of the ultra-light device thing solved that. It took a few hours apparently and it really wore the color pencils out, as well as made me feel slightly ill, but it was still worth while making this.

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For my front layer in this visual music, A guy who looks stressed out, with a few strands of sweat and posable hair-grabbing action. As you can see, some of this actually colored, the rest is still blank. Well let me tell you, this thing is hard to color on. When you use pencil, its pretty self-explanatory, but color pencil on this like drawing on an average plastic water bottle. You hardly make an indent on the paper the first time and you have to go through it like five more times to get the desired color. Then you have to smooth it out so the line aren't as obvious, like on the skin. You also want to be carefully about to not smear the pencil outline off, it can come off pretty easily and might lose something nice looking, while also messing up the shading. I don't remember the name of this material, but I'll come back to this when I get this information again.

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Umm... here it is... a practice drawing with music as the basis. Our class was given the options to make musical art using King Crimson's "The Talking Drum" or Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". I chose the former because it gave the most defined image, thinking of espionage infiltration going from hectic to failure. However to my dismay, the point of this practice piece was to use abstract objects and lines, so no specific objects like people. So now with that in mind, I gathered a bunch of different color chalk pastel to express their entry points, the formation of instrument sound waves, how certain instruments sound when played, and how they change or if they disappear throughout the song. For example, the most memorable piece of sounds within the song was the siren-like sound, and to me, sounds like those are like a deep red color with pointy edge to symbolism the sharp nature of the song. Or how the picture is designed in levels, with going from bottom to top and the way colors and designs were layered were meant to express how each section of the song shows off instruments Looking back at all this, I can't help but looking at this without cringing, but I don't know why, it's not like there was correct way to interpret. But I guess my use of the chalk was to blame, it was too bulky to make a straight line and as a result, most of the separate pieces became more sloppy than I intended.

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Now here's the second one of the two emotion drawings. First, take a moment to figure out the word and don't proceed on until you have an answer... Time's up, the correct answer is "confusion". The point of this paper was drawing something that from this perspective, it kind of boggles the mind a little. That's mainly why the mobius strip and the other rolled paper is intertwining with each other, but what I think what made this less provoking was that no real focus point was established and without that, understanding a mobius strip is actually much easier to comprehend, at least I think so. But either way, I thought of mobius strips like these being confusing, which is why I made this, just generalization.

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This here is my first of two emotion drawings, using nothing but lines, shapes and shades. Think what you will, but unscrambling the word up top with give you the emotion I aimed for. However, I don't think that there'll be much else to perceive this as and I think that's why this feels lackluster to me. I wish I could make something more or out of this so the idea isn't so one-dimensional. But then what about it does symbolize the word above to me? If you haven't gotten it by now, the word is "hope" and when making this, I ultimately wanted a hole of light in the center of the paper as darkness surrounds this circle. Though the 3-D rectangles look like a ladder from one perspective, it's supposed to be stairs and when making them, I wanted to stay as bright as the hole among the dark to show that hope is always one step away and that as long as you stay on the bright path, the forces to kill that hope won't harm you. The Hole of light is there to represent that goal or accomplishment we hope to gain.

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Here's a fun idea, take your initials (you do know them, right?) and make something with as they are. That's the idea behind these sketches, taking my initials (Nikolas Dunham Njaastad) and making objects with or objects with the initials added in synthetically. Now if you can make more unique things with those initials, Fantastic! For me however, it wasn't easy, mainly because not a lot of objects take the shape of an "N", but do with a "D", and when your initials are 2/3 "N", it's difficult to make use of both of them. It's a shame that the ones that I really liked were ones that probably weren't going to work in the next works to the right, like the sock-puppet. And the stuff that looked abstract enough to work, just looked too dull to continue further with it. I guess I can safely say that I've never experienced using my initials for as creative needs as these and certainly as many others from our peers. Then again, I don't think much about initials in the first place.