Elephants and Art

There is a famous fable — maybe you’ve heard it before — of six blind men who come across an elephant.

The first man feels the leg of the elephant and says, “I knew it! An elephant is like an oak tree.”

The second man, a bit skeptical, grabs hold of the elephant’s tail. “Don’t be dumb, an elephant is like a piece of rope.”

“Seriously guys?” says the third man as he touches the elephant’s trunk. “Elephant is just another name for a snake.”

The fourth blind man, not a fan of snakes, approaches the elephant cautiously and touches the ear. “An elephant is like a big leather jacket!”

The fifth man, a fan of leather, rushes toward the elephant, slamming face first into it’s stomach. “You’re all wrong... An elephant is like a brick wall.”

The sixth man, laughing, touches the elephant’s tusk. “I don’t know why I spend time with you fools. An elephant is just like a pipe!”

As is human nature, the men begin to fight over who is right. Just as the fight nearly escalates into a blind boxing match, an artist who has been quietly observing the entire affair makes his way over to the men.

“Hey Guys, I couldn’t help but overhear the cause of this altercation and I would like to inform you that you are all correct. The elephant has each of those characteristics. You just can’t agree because you all have differing perspectives.”

What's that got to do with ATCsJr 

& your art?  

Easy.  You see things your own way.  It doesn't make it wrong - it just makes it your perspective.  And your perspective is just as right as each of those blind men who thought they each knew what an elephant was.  Your art is unique and represents how you are in the world.  So, no matter what comes out of your creativity,

YOU ARE RIGHT!

Today's my birthday

So, what am I doing with it?  ART, of course!  lol.  I'm finishing up the ATCs I started for the classroom trade we have going and I'm doing another large nebula.  It's not as large as the one I made for Daphne's birthday, but it's still 11x14!  That's a whole lot bigger than an ATC!  Hahahaha

As I'm doing it, I kind of have to wonder if I'm just being a glutton for punishment or if I really enjoy doing the large-scale nebula.  It's turning out better than I anticipated; partially due to a mistake I made.

I love mistakes!

They turn out so cool with art.  It's a clear way to see that mistakes are just another way of doing something a certain way that didn't work out.  But you get to learn a whole new way of doing something else.  ::grins::

So.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me!  lol

Daphne's Birthday Present

I made a *large* painting of a nebula for Daphne's birthday present.  The atcs were so fun that I figured a way larger version would be even more fun.  I was wrong - the larger the canvas, the more work it is.  lol.  It turned out great, still, and Daphne is thrilled with it.  See above!

Related articles

• New Dimension: Nebulas Are Even More Amazing in 3-D
• Animated GIFs of deep space objects in 3D

End of the Mayan Calendar

Today marks the end of the Mayan Calendar.  What's that mean?  Well, the same thing that our year long calendars mean when they come to an end - it's time to restart the year with a new number!  :)  Today is the first day of Winter!

It gives a nice warm glow to a person when they get to wake up in the morning and realize that there's a whole new Cycle that starts tomorrow AND we're just a few days from opening presents, doesn't it?  Glow also happens to be the word of the week on IllustrationFriday.com, too.  Perhaps you should mark the day with a new piece of art that will remind you that an end to a calendar simply means you start a new one the next day.

EoA: Line

Who would have thought that LINES could get a whole blog post of their own??  Certainly not I; that is, until today.  Lines are incredible complex, when you really think about them.  They're what I call "complex simple."

Lines are simple.  _______________  <-Line.  Blah.  Done.  But that one line can become so many things!

Thicker, thinner, dashed, hashed, messy, squiggly, straight, bold, almost transparent, double, triple, curved, angled...  Lines are what makes up the world around us.

Your house has lines, your dog has lines.  Your cat has lines, your face has lines.

They're sort of the main building blocks for creating a piece of art.  The goal of art, after all, is to share what the artists see.  Since everyone sees things differently, the world has many truths in it.

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

EoA: Shape

Shape is what you use when you're making the outlines of your artwork on your canvas.  Typically, it's thought of as a two dimensional aspect of art, but applied to marble or clay, it could also take on some aspects of form.

To really get your hands dirty with shape, it's best to just grab a pencil and start drawing the basic shapes you learned in kindergarten.  Circle, triangle, square.  Those shapes are kind of like the primary colors: Red, yellow, blue.  With those colors, you can make every other color.  Using just those three shapes, you can make just about every other shape, simply by varying the size, angles, "squish," and "stretch" of the shape.

Squish and stretch aren't historic art terms that you'll find in an art class, by the way.  They're mine.  :)  I think of squishing as pinching it top to bottom and stretching as pulling the shape top to bottom; or left to right, if that's the orientation you prefer!

But if you squish a circle, you get a short fat oval.  If you stretch it, you still get an oval but it's long and thin now.  Same thing goes for the other shapes.

Now comes the fun part!  Laying those shapes (squished, stretched, and made the right size) over the top of each other gives you the form of things you already know.  For instance, if you took a square and overlapped another one of the exact same size, but changed the angle a little, you'd get an octagon.  Color it red and it's a stop sign.

If you take a square and put a triangle on top of it, it looks like a house.

You manipulate the shape until it looks like the thing you're looking at!

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

EoA: Form

Form is the outline of any object or set of objects.  So, if you saw something you'd normally recognize, like in this image:

You know that it's a ballet dancer, by the outline or form of the shape.  You don't know what her race is, nor do you know what color her dress is, but you know she's a ballet dancer just by her form.

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

EoA: Space

This particular Element of Art refers to the emptiness or area between, around, above, below, or within objects.  Space can be both positive and negative.  If you're working with positive space, you're working with the actual forms that you intent your observer to engage with.  If you're working with negative space, you're working with the space around your main objects.

As an example, let's look at a capital letter O on a lavender background:

O

If your whole piece of art consisted of a big O, like this, on a lavender colored ATC, the black O would be positive space (or the thing you want people to look at first).  Behind and inside the O is the negative space - basically, everything that's lavender colored.

MC Escher has tons of work that's prime examples of utilizing space in inventive ways:

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

EoA: Texture

This is one of my personal favorite aspects of art.  Texture refers to one of two things:

1. the actual physical way a piece of art feels (hard, smooth, rough, bumpy) to the touch, with your fingers.
2. the implied texture of a drawing.  It feels smooth to the touch, but it *looks* like it could give you the physical sensations in the same way the actual sensations do (bumpy, smooth, rough, knobby, furry).

A great example of how to use texture is found in the works of one of my favorite artists, Vincent Van Gogh.    In this painting, it looks like the bark of the tree is rough and that the leaves of the tree would probably be crispy if you touched it.  The painting uses both aspects of texture.  Van Gogh slathered on paint and it's bumpy to the physical touch, but the images invoke the sense you'd get if you could touch the real thing, too.

Van Gogh's Mulberry Tree

Detail of Mulberry Tree

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

EoA: Value

Value is what you use when you're working with black and white.  It's the grays in between the extremes of white and black that give the idea of depth and brings out the image.  Value suggests textures, planes, and shows where light comes from.

Value includes shadows and light.  Without value, everything looks like it's flat and lacking in realism.

Compliments of  http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

EoA: Color

Color permeates our daily lives.  Some people, who vividly recall their dreams, also report dreaming in color.  We use it liberally in our society now, almost to the point of taking it for granted.  (Personally, I think that's why humans worked so hard to develop fluorescent colors.)  We can get a *wide* variety of color in our art materials now, too.  As an example, Copic markers come in four sets of 72 colors.  Prismacolor markers come in a set of 156.  The monitors we look at, these days, have 32 bit color, or 16,777,216 colors!  And your HD TV?  It's got over a billion colors.  A BILLION!  That's a 1 with 9 zeros behind it!

Truly, we're spoiled with the amount of color in our lives, considering that, historically, if you had a brightly colored anything (that wasn't "natural" colors like greens, browns, and greys), you cherished it and passed it on to your kids.  Color had a big impact on what a family heirloom was and, unless you were of the elite classes, your family only had a handful of those colored items.

Basically, we're trying to bring the colors our eyes see to a tangible medium that we can pass on from generation to generation.  Can you paint fireworks, as your eyes see them, with just 156 colors?  How about 16,777,216 colors?  What about a billion colors?   Sadly, not even a high definition TV can match what our eyes see.  But that's our goal: to match and capture what our eyes see, so we can share our true perceptions of the world around us with others.

Resources:

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm

Elements of Art

Just like a chocolate chip cookie recipe calls for a certain amounts of ingredients (like sugar, flour, baking soda, eggs, vanilla, and chocolate chips), art has things that make it "art," too.  If you're a Master Chef/Baker, you use more complex ingredients to make your signature dish (think truffles, shallots, prawns, Celtic sea salt, white pepper, and a mix of Romano/Parmesan cheeses).

Amateur artists use basic "ingredients," just like the home-baker uses the basic ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies.  Master Artists have their own "ingredients" to create their "signature dish," but the ingredients in art, however, are called elements.  The elements used in art are line, shape, form, space, texture, value and color.

There are always at least two Elements in every piece of art; even a piece that's a white board with a black line separating the piece into two halves.  That piece would be called a minimalistic art piece and it shows both line and space.  To be honest, you could even include texture in that, because there's the texture of the canvas and the texture of the medium used to make the line!  Even a dot in the middle of a canvas displays space, texture, & shape.  Honestly, I can't think of a piece of art that doesn't have at least three of those Elements.

Why are the Elements important?

It's really so you can get an idea that art is simple and easy and YOU can do it, too.  What's so hard about line, shape, form, space, texture, value, and color?  I have to say, individually, the elements aren't hard at all.

Even more than that, knowing what the elements of art are let's us:

1. share what we think of a piece of art using language that everyone has already agreed to.
2. gives you the tools to figure out what's going on in an artwork.
3. lets each of us describe what an artist has done, again using those tools everyone's already agreed to use.

I found a quick video from about.com that sort of quickly hops all over these, too.

It's all about Perspective

Drawing in the right perspective can be tough unless you've got a "formula" or a "recipe" for how to do it.  Ever wonder how artists, architects, and engineers get a drawing to look more like real life than a drawing?   It's all about perspective.  Are you looking from a worm's view, bird's view, dog's view, mouse's view, or a human's view?  There's so many different ways to look at the world!

Image from http://www.watercolorpainting.com/perspective_1_2_3_point.htm

Generally speaking, there's three "point" perspectives:  Single, Double, and Triple.  With Single Point Perspective, you pick a point on your horizon.  All lines going up and down go up and down perfectly straight.  All the other lines, however, meet together at that one point, also in a straight line.  It's sort of strange when you're drawing it, but when it's all finished up, it looks right.  :)

Image from http://www.watercolorpainting.com/perspective_1_2_3_point.htm

Double Point Perspective follows the same idea, but you split your image in two.  So, you pick two points on the horizon you've chosen, then decide where the middle of your piece of art will be.  All horizontal lines that are on the left of the middle come together at the horizon dot on the left.  All horizon lines on the right of your image meet at the spot on the right.

Image from http://www.watercolorpainting.com/perspective_1_2_3_point.htm

Three Point Perspective is where you start getting into who's view of the world you're looking at.  Basically, the difference between Double Point and Triple Point is that the vertical lines (the ones going up and down) don't go up and down, they meet at a tertiary point.  If that point is in the sky, the point is called the zenith.  But if it's in the Earth, it's called a nadir.

Bob Ostrom, on Jerry's Artarama made a video to teach a good way to do it: Three Point Perspective.

New on ATCsJr Forums: Lego Art!

We've got a whole new set of forums out on ATCsJr.com now!  It's all about Legos!  Not only do we have line art so you can design your own lego head, but we've also got line art so you can design your own lego person!  Stick 'em on an ATC card and trade those fun little pieces of art.

There's tons of fine art out in the world; online, in museums, even in print/poster form! What would it look like if you made some of those artists' works out of legos? What would it look like if you incorporated some legos into their pieces??

Give it a shot! Pick your favorite piece of art, and Lego-ify it!

Self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh LEGO’d by “nismo4banger:” 

I've no idea who did these next ones, but they're some great examples!

Girl with the Pearl Earring

The Last Supper

Vitruvian Man

Mona Lisa

Monday Artday!

I just found a fun website/blog called Monday Artday.  They have a weekly challenge, like our Try It Tuesday and Illustration Friday, but their day is Monday!  :)  I think I'll post their challenges over on our trading site, too.

I'm a little concerned that some kids may think they need to do it all.  All the challenges, all the art on every day of the week, all the fun stuff over there.  So, just for the record, you get to be picky!  You don't have to do *any* of them, if you don't feel like it.  We don't in our house!  Sometimes, you just gotta go with the flow and it's not anyone else's flow that counts - just yours.

HOWEVER!

If you don't know what to draw/paint/mold or hammer into leather/metal, then there's gobs of ideas out there for you to pull from.  *AND* you don't have to do the most recent thing - if there's a topic you like that was from a month ago and you feel like doing that one instead of the current one, you go right ahead and do that!

Try It Tuesday: Picasso

This week, at ATCsJr.com, I've challenged everyone to try a Picasso for Try It Tuesday.  If you're reading my blog as well as doing Try It Tuesday, I've got a major leg up for you.  Head out to that website and browse the images other people have done, then click the "Create" button and Try It yourself!

My clay Starry Night

As promised, here's my process.  Pictures just don't do this justice - it looks so much better in person!

First, I made the scene out of fast drying clay:

Then, after it was dryed out (it took a bit longer than I expected, probably because it was so thick), I started painting it with acrylics.  Here's the first go at it, before I had to let the paint dry or risk messing it up:

Here's the final version of it:

And a few of the close ups next.  You can begin to see in these three photos what I can see here sitting before me:

A CLOSE look at Starry Night

In keeping with the Try It Tuesday theme of the Night Sky, I found a * fantastically wonderfully awesome* site to take a look at Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night (it's one of my favorite pieces of art).

Want to see it?  I know you do - you can get in close enough to see the brush strokes and how he mixed the paints right on the canvas...

See that little window inside the picture I've uploaded?  That's the section of the larger painting that you're looking at with all the brush strokes and everything!  Browns, greys, whites, blues, some blacks, and look that yellow!

Art & Music together in a "book"

And it's not even on a nook or ipad!  It's a great site full of lots of art and classical music.  Combining the two has been done throughout the ages, but not in such a way that it's readily available and entertaining for kids, too!  The Animated Children's Book site provides great art along with great music and makes it interesting for their viewers - of course, you don't have to be young in order to enjoy it.

Happy Hallowe'en!

Happy Hallowe'en!

Hallowe'en is my most favorite holiday, next to Aunt Jay Day.  (Yah, I made that one up and we celebrate it on my half birthday, August 27th.)  Hallowe'en is the day that everyone gets to "dress up" and show the world who they really are on the inside.

To celebrate, I thought I'd share a really fun site that I found...  Take a look!