New vs. Old

So I haven't posted in a while (almost a year actually *laughs nervously*), so I decided to get back to blogging and post some of the more recent art that I've done. I hope to start posting once a week from now on. I actually went on a month exchange to Beijing, so I have some artwork to post from there too. 

This is a piece that I recently finished. It's acrylic on canvas. I made this piece to explore the idea of new vs. old. New is innovative and more comfortable, while things that are old hold memories and are often hard to leave behind. As a little child I read a fairytale that was about an old house on a new street, the story was wonderfully personified . Here's the link if you want to read it http://hca.gilead.org.il/old_hous.html . The painting is loosely based on that story.  I tried to use more somber dark colors in the old part of the painting and stick to the primary colors in the new part. An interesting technique I wanted to note was one I used in the upper right hand corner. Most people that have tried painting before have heard of using salt, but usually with watercolor. However, if you water down acrylic and sprinkle it with salt then wait for it to dry, it also gives a very interesting effect. 

So that's all for now, I'm currently working on four other pieces, yikes, but I'll regularly post new or old stuff that I finished in the last year. 

More Dragon

I decided to continue with my dragon obsession, and now I finally have the ability to draw a dragon the way I want it to look, rather than be a disappointment. I started off with a rather apocalyptic scene, but closer to finishing the painting I decided to add the grass and moss on the rocks, which made it look as though the destruction happened a lot time ago rather than right now. It is done in acrylic paint.

Cats,cats, cats.....

I did this piece of artwork using ink for the background and acrylic for the cats. I started this idea thinking that I would draw the view of the backyard from my house in Russia. Once I was almost finished I realized that the painting was very bland and decided to spice it up. There are many homeless cats in our backyards that the people feed, so I decided to include them in my painting. I made the cats in color because I wanted them to stand out. The cats add life to the artwork. Of course there are mistakes, I realized that the bike in the background is almost the size of the car and the car itself isn't very realistic. I had trouble drawing some of the cats too, especially the pouncing kitten. I'm thinking about doing some practice drawing cat figures in different poses.

* just a quick update, I recently entered this into the scholastic art and writing competition and it got gold. Yay!

A Hatching Dragonling

I once got a polymer clay kit for my birthday and I loved it. It gives you endless possibilities and makes perfect gifts when you're too cheap to buy something. I got this idea while searching for smooth rocks for my tree project on the beach and found a rock that looked like an egg. I really like dragons, they made the list of random things that I like to draw, which also includes puddles, eyes, mannequins and many other absolutely random things. I use white polymer clay, mostly because it's cheaper and paint it once it's out of the oven and hard. To make the ground underneath the egg look like rock, I mixed sand into it. I'm working on something similar now, except it includes a snake wrapped around a large rock. I hope to eventually make these as realistic as possible, so I'll be posting more things like this soon.

Bottle Penguins

                    The holiday season is coming up.... actually it's still a month away, stores however seem to think that now that Halloween is over, it's time for Christmas. Regardless of whether you are putting up your holiday decorations or preparing for Thanksgiving, these penguins are sure to brighten up your day. I found these on a social media site that many Russian people use, here is the link to their vkontakte page http://vk.com/klub_rukodeliya. The image on the right is from their page, that gives you instructions for making them,  and the picture on the left is a penguin my brother and I made while waiting for hurricane Sandy to pass. This is a really fun project to do with little kids and it would be so cool to make a lot of them and put them on display around the house.

The growth of a blue tree

 I finally finished the project with the blue tree! Yay! Thank you to hurricane Sandy for giving me time off from school to let me finish this. To summarize this project quickly, I took a stick and spray painted it blue, cut out felt leaves in two different colors and used paint to draw the veins on the leaves, I used white paint to draw veins on the dark blue leaves and dark blue to draw veins on the light blue leaves. I used rocks to keep the tree upright in the flower pot. The blue rocks on top are smooth, round rocks that I found on the beach and spray painted two colors of blue. I glued the leaves on using wood glue and hot glue. This project took me about 40 days to complete and was a lot of fun. Now it makes my room super unique and makes me feel like I'm in my own special forest.

My life in a nutshell

This is a watercolor painting that I did from a collection of old photos. I really wanted to do a piece of artwork using ink and acrylic paint, but once I did the sketch for this I realized that watercolor would work better. This picture has some scenes from when I was really young, like the one in the lower right hand corner and recent ones too,  like the house it the upper middle. I thought it was interesting to do something that summarizes my life in a series of small snapshots.