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.

Gymnopedie

This painting was based on music that I played on the piano about a year ago, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atejQh9cXWI , here's the link to the music if you want to listen to it. I know that most teenagers aren't into classical music, but just listen to it and see if you get a similar image in your head. I got the image of someone walking in autumn in the gray rainy streets, slowly talking steps in time with the rhythm. The wind blowing their hair back...
The puddle is extremely colorful and may remind you of another painting that I previously wrote about. I wanted to show rain in a positive and happy way. My art teacher pointed out that a diagonal composition of the puddle on the page creates a sense of moving forward, which was a helpful tip for doing some of my other paintings also. This is currently my favorite painting. I did it either in the beginning of 2012 or end of 2011, so it's pretty recent.

Mannequins

I haven't posted anything in a while, main reason being I was fighting a battle against a biology test. Now I'm back and decided to talk about something that is near and dear to me, which would be these mannequins. Why do I like them so much? They are really fun to draw and are really good practice drawing human figures. If you've never seen these before you should probably get in your car right now and drive to the nearest art store and get one. I had an idea of getting several and suspending them off my ceiling (because my room isn't weird enough as is), but I didn't get to it yet, maybe a project for another day. <3

Style

I takes a while for an artist to figure out what their style is. Often times I look back through my drawings (and I have a lot) and find similar things that show up. I often put bricks in my paintings, I use wooden mannequins a lot, and I tend to use bright colors or no color at all. I have a big imagination and the idea of a city or world different from ours intrigues me. These paintings I did a while ago, but they convey an earlier style I had and present an interesting idea. One of the paintings was meant to be a world of wooden mannequins (that you can get at any art store) and the other is a world of invisible people. I sometimes look at the people in the drawings an try to figure out what characteristics I was trying to convey through something other that their face, because they have none. :)

An unruly classroom

This drawing is nothing like what happens in a normal classroom, but we all can dream, right?
 Most of the people in this drawing are real people in my life, or representations of a certain type of people. If I know you personally you may find yourself in this picture, some people in the painting are not my friends though, just random people that somehow stood out to me. The teacher's face is a little cheesy, and somehow doll-like. There are three of me in this painting, you'll probably find two, but the third is just a representation that looks nothing like me. I guess Pythagorean's theorem just isn't exciting enough to keep a class engaged.

Blue tree update

 













 I worked a little bit on the tree project over the weekend.  I cut out the leaves, I used felt, but the kind that is more stiff than cloth, don't know what it's called. I also found the right stick for the trunk and started spray painting it. I ran out of spray paint though, so here's a tip, if you ever plan to paint anything, buy enough paint first! Here's a time lapse video of me painting. Enjoy, the music isn't mine, it's someone like you, by Adele.

More room design

Since I can never work on just one project at once I started another one recently. Which leaves me currently working on about six pieces of art. This is just something fun I wanted to try out to lighten up my room. I found this idea a while ago, but I never really got to it. These are yarn spheres, or at least that's what I call them. In order to make them you take a balloon, trying to get it to be more sphere than egg shape and then make a solution of water, glue and if you want cornstarch to make it to be a consistency of watery paint and dip string in it and wrap it around the balloon. It is also a good idea to cover the balloon in something slippery like Vaseline so that when the yarn dries you can pop the balloon and the yarn won't stick to it. The images above I got from the web, not my creation. The ones I'm making aren't finished yet. If my description isn't specific enough on how to make them here are some links:
http://www.weddingbee.com/2011/08/03/diy-yarn-spheres-1/
http://artfulaussie.com/tag/yarn-spheres-diy/
if you like these than give it a try too. I want to make some and hang them from my ceiling.
thanks for reading,
bluebeaver7 <3

Defeat

This is an acrylic painting that I did 3-4 years ago. I wanted to do something like this a little while ago, like an updated version if that's what you want to call it, but then I realized that chess is way too common of a theme in art. I wanted this picture to represent defeat, I wanted the black figure to radiate power. I wanted it to be intimidating without having an actual face. I obviously didn't reach all that because I didn't and probably don't have the skill level. Some people don't understand what is behind the chess board and just to clarify it's someone's feet that they put on the chess table, bad manners right there.

A creepy touch to any room

Now that I've started on the topic of my room I might as well talk about these. They are wooden and painted with acrylic. I made them in eighth grade in my applied science class, which is kinda like a wood workshop. For our last year in middle school we could do whatever project we wanted and I had no idea what I was gonna do, but then I got this idea and I knew it was perfect. I had an obsession with drawing eyes then because I just figured out how to make them look realistic. They hang in my room next to my awesome nerd clock and they aren't actually as creepy as they seem, unless of course you're walking into your room at night. I feel like they add a nice touch to the room, diffidently unique.

Inky streets

This is a painting of a street in France. The black is pens and the color is colored ink (watered down of course). I drew this using a photograph, however I could not find it, which is too bad. I really wanted to do something with ink and I got my wish. My inspiration here was my art teacher,  I got the idea of using colored ink to fill empty spaces from her work.

A forest indoors

I really like my room and I love to decorate it. This is my wall, it's painted with normal wall paint. I got the idea from the Mass. MoCA museum where there was a giant exhibit of Sol Lewit's work that were giant wall paintings of all different styles. I loved the museum and spend a whole lot of time there. When I got home I started painting my wall wavy purple, blue and white stripes (luckily my parents approved). However soon I got really bored and it stayed unfinished for more than half a year. Soon I was so sick of it I painted it all over in white and started doing this, but I got bored soon again. Only with my mom's constant nagging (thank you mom) I managed to finish it before the summer 2012 and I am so glad that's over with. It's not perfect, but the idea of actually working on it again.... well it's not gonna happen anytime soon. However I am happy with the result and my room has become a lot cooler.

Walking in the rain

This is a picture I did in art class with my art teacher, Katya (who is amazing by the way if you didn't know). Here's her site, www.katya-art.com, there you can check out her work as well as her students'. She teaches in Russian, but we do have a girl that doesn't speak Russian in our class also. If you want to take art classes I highly recommend her studio. Now I'm getting sidetracked, anyway this is acrylic and I liked the idea of showing rain in a positive way and that's why I made the puddles so colorful. This picture has a very similar style to another one I drew that I will write about later and is kind of like an after thought. Someone said that the woman looks like Mary Poppins and I never really thought about it that way before, but I guess you can think of it that way also.
<3
bluebeaver7

A blue tree?

This is something I'm working on right now, it's not a drawing, but more of a design project. Right now I'm working on the pot in which my "plant" is going to grow. The pot is clay and spray painted blue. The top is bits of magazine with black and white writing and I'm using gloss blue paint to outline the pieces of magazine. I will get a big tree-looking stick, paint it blue and glue on blue leaves. I don't know what I'm going to use for the leaves though. I'm thinking about using felt. I'll post weekly updates on this project. That will keep me from getting lazy and not finishing it. :)
<3
bluebeaver7

A blue horse

To start things off I decided to start with an old picture that I really like. Now I don't want you to think that everything I do is blue. Blue is my favorite color and I do tend to use it everywhere I can, but the fact that this lovely horse happens to be blue is just a coincidence. It is drawn with acrylics and this a picture that I did a while ago, maybe when I was 9-10, I really don't know. However it is still one of my favorites because of the simplicity and somewhat of an innocence in the painting. You can say that I got the inspiration from my elementary school art teacher (Ms.Birdy, I think that's what her name was) however her drawing looked nothing like this one. It had rainbow wavy hills and a horse eating grass in the far background. I honestly don't know how my brain turned her drawing into this, but I'm glad it did. I like that the black and white back ground makes the horse and all it's blueness stand out. Overall this drawing is not the most advanced artistically and many people wonder why it's one of my favorites. But I don't think that the most advanced drawing is always the best. Oh and also this is probably about the highest quality photos I can get because many drawings are very big and don't fit into my scanner, so I hope to make the best of a normal digital camera.
Thanks for reading,
bluebeaver7 <3

Hello!

Hello, I'm bluebeaver7, a young artist and mostly recently I've been experimenting with my favorite styles. I love cubism, expressionism, modern, impressionism and many more. I also realized that I don't really like drawing realism. Don't get me wrong,  I believe in drawing well, but now with cameras on every phone and computer there really is no point in spending forever on drawing something that can just as easily be done with one click of a button. That does not mean that art is useless though. I believe art should be used to tell a story or convey feelings about what you are drawing. If it is pleasant to the eye then I say it's a success, however sometimes an artist puts something personal in their artwork that a viewer doesn't understand. Of course my art isn't as deep as that, but it does have meaning and a back story. I made this blog so that I could post some of my artwork, success and failures, and write a little about it. I have really never done anything like this before, and I do this mostly for myself however if you do enjoy reading this that would make me really happy. Thank you and I will have lots of material out soon. Thank you. I <3 you!