6 days to go!

... till I get to go home!

Yesterday I sold my poem/illustration project to a guy who wanted to give it to the girl who wrote my poem. It was my first art sell! I was pretty excited.

In other news, today my Illustration class is working on the mural for the men's homeless shelter. Saturday, Harry and I are going to the Art Institute of Chicago!

Couldn't have asked for a better way to end the last week of school.

For a little touch of retro, here's one of the last projects I did last year in 3D Design.

I call them the ''Van Gogh shoes''.

Art show!

Here is everyone's artwork from the show we just had at Higher Grounds:

*note: I would have LOVED to get closer and better pictures for the sake of the detail work in many of these pieces, but the light in the place + my camera would not allow it. Sorry!
*other (slightly funny) note: When Kayla hung her poem up beside my piece, I noticed that it was a LOT longer than the poem that I used. Then when she read it aloud, it was almost a completely different poem! But luckily, the lines I put from the poem onto my piece were lines that she kept the same - what a fortunate coincidence, I thought.

Poem/illustration project

Phew! Can't believe it's been over a month since my last update! No time for beating myself up about it, though. I've have a lot to get through!

One of the most important projects of late is the poem/illustration project. Each of us were given a poem from a student in one of the English classes and our job was to create a piece of art for that poem. The poem I received is called ''Missing'' by Kayla Koury. It goes like this:

I went to a land of dreaming spires,
But I didn't want to leave.
To think I would not love being there,
I suppose it was naive.
My heart aches to be away,
like a long arm in a very short sleeve.

For at the time,
I did not understand
that the land of brats and cheese
was not my true homeland.
For in this place I felt a peace
as if my right was holding my left hand.

I would have loved to linger and dream,
I wanted to stay there forever.
I'm not crossing my fingers behind my back,
I'm not playing tricks or being clever.
Somehow it just felt right.
To come back home, I was okay with never.

After meeting with Kayla, I discovered that the Land of Dreaming Spires is another name for Oxford in England, where she studied abroad last semester. Then it became my task to create a piece of art that I felt expressed the essence of her poem in the best way. I decided the feeling of the artwork should be dreamlike - playing off the ''dreaming'' spires idea and the line ''I would have loved to linger and dream''. And of course, the person dreaming had to be Kayla. After a few sketches of ideas, this is basically the composition I came up with:

I got a chance to ask her what her favorite landmarks were that she visited during her trip, and she mentioned the Radcliffe Camera Library at Oxford, the Bodelian Library, the Roman aqueducts at Segovia, Stonehenge, and she also mentioned that she loved the green countryside of England, so I tried to incorporate each landmark in some way. Anyway, I am more or less finished with the project as of today, and this is what it came out to be. It's done mostly in oil pastel with some colored pencil and acrylic paint.

I'm getting it matted tomorrow and will hopefully also get a frame soon. We're having a showing of the art and reading of the poems at the Higher Grounds cafe on Tuesday, April 13... can't wait! (I hope Kayla likes it.)