End of the 2nd Marking Period

At the beginning of the year, my art class began a project. This project was to draw and paint a self portrait and then practically and intentionally ruined it. This is the finished project. I colored in the eyes and mouth alone with colored pencil. I didn't color in the rest of it because I liked how they popped out of the darkness of the rest of the peice. My smaller portrait looked interesting, but I think I may have ruined it by adding too much colored pencil. It may not look finished, but I like just the way it is at the moment. This portrait project was hard work but it looks great.





 This is my collage. I just recently finished this project and i like how this turned out. I started with a tree and put tissue paper on it. I then traced over the shape of the tree and painted it. I had a little trouble with coming up with an idea, but I eventually came up with something. I put my favorite poem on this collage. I wrote it in pencil and went over some of the words in gold paint. The strange animals in the top left and bottom right of the collage are echidnas. They are one of my favorite animals and they are just adorable.

 My class has just recently started this new project, a metal panel. I have made paper prototypes of the metal panels I want to make. The fist one is halfway between a fish skeleton and a beautiful butterfly. The next design is supposed to be some kind of celestial owl. The last one is going to be a clasp for my book. It was hard making the small peices, especially for the fish butterfly. This is still a work in progress, so there isn't much to talk about.I hope this will turn out good, since I am better and more used to works on paper. I hope my designs will turn out the way I want them to when they are finished.

Norman Rockwell

 I grew up looking at Rockwell's varius

paintings. My mother had a book of them my grandfather used to own. Rockwell's paintings remind me of my childhood and of the happier, simpler, more content times of American history. Most of his paintings made me feel like I wanted to stay a kid forever.

Norman Rockwell was born in 1894 in New York. He wanted to be an artist since he was very young. He even left highschool to attend an art school. He became an illustrator soon after graduating and in 1916 created the first of his famous Saturday Evening Post pictures. He also created pictures for the Boy Scouts of America calander. In 1942, He painted the Four Freedoms in response to sa speech by President FDR. He began to paint less of utopian society and more of realistic concerns. He painted the picture of an African American girl being escorted by four saftey officers to school with tomatoes smeared on the wall after being thrown at the girl. It was titled "The Problem We All Live With". He died in 1978 and til that day he still painted.

Norman Rockwell is still being recognized today. The picture called "The Problem We All Live With" is even hanging outside the Oval Office.  He painted of the sweet and simple times as well as

 realistic times. He gave many people the idea of what things were like during tht time.

 This picture is one for Norman Rockwell's Boy Scouts of America calander. This has always been my favorite peice of his because I thinks it depicts nature and the boy scout and American spirit. I think this is a beautiful and expressive picture.

This peice, the Yarn Spinner, is my second favorite piece of his. This picture makes me think of old, classic pirate tales. I sometimes find my mind drifitng to think of what tales this man could tell when I look at this picture. I enjoy looking at this and all of Norman Rockwell's paintings.