Museums and stuff?!

Recently (like, 2 weeks ago this time) we went to KC and walked around to various art studios and such, asking questions and such.

Honestly, as a graphic designer, I found no use for it. These may be artists trying to get a living, but our group specializes in marketing, advertising, and creating big ideas using mix media.

Of course, as someone who wants to major in illustration hopefully, I learned quite a bit and took notes, but it was really weird...

We went to two places I can remember really well;

The Plug Project, which is a KC based art studio. They are a nonprofit group of volunteers that aim to highlight quality but somewhat unknown artists.

Basically, they are hipsters.

But what's interesting is that each exhibit they have, it's all based on something. Like people swimming or portraits.

Then, in a separate room, they have a KC artist that did something completely different.

Like someone running or sitting down, or a room without anyone.
They didn't have any art up around when we came by, but I took a picture of this light (usually it's focused on artwork, I noticed it as accent lighting from an interior design class) and a spray painted drawing in a corner somewhere.




















The second place we went to was an art studio called Bill Brady. I forgot if it was because of the artist's name, or if the artist just likes naming places with human names, but whatever works. Anyway, the art piece shown was a really awesome mix of television screens and printed tapestries, and these super awesome little spheres of different worlds..

(The last picture was from when we first walked in, they had a buncha interesting geeky stuff, but then also this really cool window looking painting.) 

Painting in bloo-Photoshop.

A few weeks ago (maybe even a month ago, whooops) I was assigned to do a painting in photoshop using the mixing paint brush, The brush basically uses the same rules as an actual brush/paint where you need things to blend and if you're awful, then you get that nasty brown from mixing all of the colors.
The picture below was what I was given to paint-ify.

Personally, I hate the composition of this picture, but whatever. It seems too simple and it really doesn't help guide your eye through the piece.

An assignment is an assignment I suppose.

And then here is my finished painting. It looks kinda cool, I'm just happy it doesn't look like the example image (which was all awful and scratchy for some reason... Paintbrushes aren't scratchy?)

I already use this brush a little bit outside of assignemnts, it's fun messing with to create texture and odd gradients, and this was fun practice for it.

Our next project was to grab a different picture and make it all paintery on our own

Above is the image I used

And dadaaa, my final is below!

My biggest issue was trying to add the smaller details and still show a lot of the texture and motion of the water. Next time I'll try and get a bigger picture and use a smaller brush.

Our last project was to paint something without using something as a base/guide, so I drew a weird portrait of a friend of mine.

For Halloween, she dressed up as a dog. It looked really good on her, so I attempted to draw it from memory.