Removing Dye from Fabric

            One of our more fun projects was when we got to bleach clothes. Everyone in the class had to bring in some kind of black fabric, such as t-shirts, pillow cases, sweatshirts, or anything else.

The process of bleaching works much like the process of tie-dying. You can tie up your fabric with string and make different types of patterns for your clothes. If you do it that way, you would first make sure that your fabric was tied tightly with the string. Then you would dunk the fabric into a bucket of bleach and wait for the color to turn from black to a red or brown color. That will usually take at the most 15 minutes. When the fabric starts to turn colors, take it out and dunk it into vinegar, all that does is to stop the bleaching. You would then take out your fabric, cut off the string, and leave it out to dry.

If you want to work with a heavier kind of fabric, such as sweatshirts (what I did), then you can’t dunk it in a bleach bucket. You would need to make a design out of tape on your fabric. My design was a smiley face on the front and on the back a saying I made up, “Smiles Are Optional.” I choose that saying because not everyone needs to look or be happy all the time, and sometimes it’s necessary for a person to feel sad or angry or any other emotion in order to function properly. Anyways, back to bleaching. After you have made your design, you take a spray bottle full of bleach and spray it on your fabric. This could take a while, with you having to constantly go back to keep bleaching, but it will get the job done. When everything is bleached, you take off your tape and leave it out to dry.

 Both methods require that you wash your fabric by itself as soon as it is dry. Washing it will help to stop the bleaching and will get rid of the very strong bleach smell. You must wash it by itself, unless you want any other clothes to get ruined.

Prints Project

From right to left: Artist Proof, Prints on White Paper, Multi-Colored Prints, Prints of Found Paper

This project was way more fun than I thought it would be! Like most art projects, the starting point for this project was to sketch out a design. I choose to design a panda cub in the middle of a bamboo forest sitting inside a basket. It’s kind of difficult to see where the bamboo begins and where the basket ends, but it’s a problem I didn't notice until it was too late.

 The next step to making a print is to carve out your design on something that can hold ink, such as wood, linoleum tiles, or in the case of our class, a rubbery type of block. Carving out your design can be very difficult. You have to have a steady hand and make sure that the type of carver you’re using is going to give you the lines you want. It can also be hard to make details depending on big the material you’re carving out is.

After everything is carved out all you have to do is pick out different types of ink and get a roller. First you put a small blob of ink onto your material and then use your roller to spread it all across. When you have enough ink on, you press it onto what you want to have your print on, this will usually be a piece of paper. To put new ink on your pattern all you have to do is wash it off and start over again. For our project, every student had to make an artist’s proof, two prints on white paper, four prints that were the same, three multi-colored prints, and two prints on “found” paper (wallpaper, magazine articles, pictures, etc). 

Acrylic Landscape Painting

          Painting is really hard. It was difficult to find a place to start, but after looking through quite a few National Geographic magazines I found inspiration from a picture I found of a lightning storm and a picture of tropical trees over water. Before I even started painting, I made a plan for what I was going to do. I just drew out some lightning and trees and water on plain paper. Then I choose a color scheme. I was a little indecisive at first, but I settled on a blue analogous color scheme. Analogous means that all the colors used in your art are closely related on the color wheel, and in my case I only used variations of blue, violet, blue-green, green, and lighter green. It seemed hard to make a painting out of just those colors at first, but there are countless numbers of tints (a color + white), shades (a color + black), and intensities (a color + its complimentary).

          My sky was the lightning storm; my background was the water; my middle ground was the trees; and my foreground was the bare land with a boat on it. There's not much light in the painting, because it's taking place in a storm, so all of the light comes from the lightning. While painting I didn't really notice what kinds of brush strokes I was using.

Ceramics Project

For the ceramics project the whole class worked with clay. I made a bowl that is 7.5 in x 6.8 in x 1.5 in. Throughout the project our teacher stressed that our ceramics had to have the design elements color, shape, form, and texture. 

To shape the clay I took a big ball of clay and rolled out a slab on a slab roller. Then I put the slab into a hump mold to make it into a bowl shape. I now use my bowl as decoration, but I would be able to eat from it.

This project taught all about glazing and how to make a decent sculpture. If I had to do it over again, I'd make a better design for inside the bowl.

Fun Fact: I got my inspiration for the bowl's shape from the Windows logo!



Pastel Still Life Project

I organized items I found from home in a very simple way, with some of the items sitting behind the others. Before I even started to use my pastels I made a thumbnail sketch. A thumbnail sketch is a small sketch an artist does to figure out what they wish to draw and how they would set it up. Some students in our class used viewfinders to help them figure out the composition of their pastel drawing; however, I did not find it helpful and just drew the items in the way that I had taken the picture.

To make some items appear dimensional I used darker colors to shade in places where there were shadows, lighter colors to shade in where the light was hitting an item, and I drew some items slightly smaller to give the appearance of it being further away. I had a balcony light as my light source, so all the items have light over top of them, making most of the shadows underneath and to the sides of items.