Finale!!

Ok. The last four of my pieces are finished and in the bag on their way to the AP graders to be judged and scrutinized. Mmm, judgement. Who doesn't want a steaming plate of judgement for breakfast?
It'll be a while before I can get the work from my concentration on the blog though. I put all the work on a CD but the CD wouldn't comply with me this morning, but for the meantime, here's my concentration statement:

My concentration is a narrative about a man's time in prison after being falsely accused, detailing his arrest, his angst in prison, his solitude, and finally his efforts to break free.

Pretty sick, I know. This is where an initial idea of edgar allan poe got me, but I'm finally done with the depressing stuff. I've already started my next piece. It is a long piece made to look like a buddhist prayer scroll. It has buddhist mantras written on it over and over to build up a nice surface quality and I drew a figure of The Buddha in the upper center of the scroll contained in a lotus flower. The background is black on brown paper, to represent Mara tempting the Buddha, and the Lotus flower around him represents his enlightenment overcoming the temptation. I'm excited for this piece.

Arrrarararararaarrarar!!

Besides the recent development of a pirate growl at the beginning of this post, I have been working hard on artsy things. Take a look:

Der studio werkstatt

This is my studio space. You like it. Don't lie.

(The mound of junk is out of the frame. I haven't seen my desktop since Christmas break.)

There comes a time for realization...

It has dawned upon me that my mind is an incredibly liquid thing, thus the liquidity of my mind has left me to drown all of my hopes of Poe's tale in the murk of the Tennessee River. I have been pondering upon my four completed pieces and I've found that other than a somewhat consistent visual style (except for the first piece(the skull(it's too pretty to be mine(which is why I gave it up to Palate 2 Palette(the student art fundraiser show downtown))))), the only theme is Imprisonment. The pieces have a feeling of angst as Ms. Carmichael pointed out and most are pictures of incarcerated people. I feel that changing my concentration to this new theme will somewhat free me from the bear trap of Poe that I have stepped in. When I shifted gears today visions of jail cells, criminals, and police brutality flashed into my head which kept with the angstful theme. I'm hoping that the newfound freedom will set me along a more direct path to AP Enlightenment. Why isn't that a class?

3&4

We're getting there.

First Two Concentration Piecezzz

This is the first drawing I've done for my concentration. This was supposed to be the repeating theme of my work, having a skull in every piece, but as you can see by the next piece I abandoned the repetition of the skull and went for an alternation between close-up scenes and zoomed out scenes.



This is a close up of a wrist being shackled to go along with the plot of "The Casque of Amontillado". Read the story to find out what it means.

Concentration beginnings

For my concentration I have decided to illustrate one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, The Cask of Amontillado. Ever since I first heard any of Poe's works I was amazed by how captivating the stores were although they were sometimes fairly morbid. As I was looking at some works of Gustave Dore, I came across his illustrations from The Raven. These illustrations gave me a new sense of what I could do with my drawings. I decided to illustrate this story of Poe's that I was most familiar with to put it into a new perspective for myself.

I have come up with a short storyboard of the story:

This is a study of the chained Fortunato in the cellar.