My Professional Portfolio Blog

My Professional Portfolio

Portfolio Review

At Northern Illinois in order to stay in the Art Education Program all students must go through a portfolio review process. The process is basically looking at 20 of my best pieces of art work and deciding whether or not I can continue in the program. The forms are long and the technicalities are excruciating. but i have finally finished mine. I have turned it in and now I play the waiting game. Hopefully it passes because if it doesn't i will politely be asked to choose another program of study. EEEK! Here are the pieces that I submitted.

Door Decs and Dorm Rooms

I moved into NIU two weeks ago to begin CA training. I finally have a chance to show everybody what my room looks like. Its nothing spectacular but it's an improvement to last year.

As a CA I am also required to make door decs' or door decorations with the residents names on them. Here are the ones that I made.

Flair!

This past week I was at the University of California San Diego for a conference called NACURH (National Association of College and University Residence Halls). This conference was a way for the best programs from schools across the country to become available to other schools. In the process of seeing all of the amazing programs delagates from different schools trade clothespins or FLAIR between each other in order to get to know other people from different schools. Here is me all flaired out.


Here is all of the flair I collected

Some Ceramics

Well summer is here and with it comes a summer job an summer school.
Here is some of the ceramic work that I completed this past spring
These are some hand - built abstract pieces.
They are made using earthenware clay and covered with a substance called Terra sigelata



Here are some of the better pieces that I completed using a potters wheel.
Made with stoneware and covered with highfire glaze

The End is Finally Here.

That's right the school year has finally come to an end. With it some great classes have also ended. Here is my culmination piece in my drawing class.


This project was a Doppelganger project. This meant that we had to deal with two sides of ourselves. Doppelgangers can be good, bad or neither. They can be a depiction of the future, who you might be or even a depiction of the past or a different life. In my doppelganger I chose to do myself now,and myself in the future. I did a self portrait of myself now, being contemplative of the future, and of myself in the future, the jovial teacher with paint on his shirt leaning forward with a large smile and paintbrush in hand.

What will your Doppelganger say about you?

The medium that this was done in was Prismacolor Nu Pastels and Rembrandt Soft Pastels.

Up next some final projects in Ceramics and Printmaking

Etching, ethcing and etching Oh My!

Finally we began etching in my printmaking class.
Etching or intaglio has always been my favorite technique when it comes to printmaking.

To create the plate used in this process you take a sheet of metal, in this case copper, and cover the surface with a tar like substance known as hard ground. After the hard ground is applied you scratch away at the surface revealing the copper plate.

After you have completed your drawing you place the entire plate into an acid bath. Where you scratched away the acid will eat and will create a groove for ink to sit. You can then apply ink and run the plate through the press to get your print.

In these prints I decided to focus on similarities in features. Since figure drawing is not my forte I decided to instead look at similarities between different facial features. Dad

John
David
You will notice that both me and my dad have glasses and my brothers chin is very similar to that of my dad's. I addressed the eyes of my dad and I the same way and my brother and I both have hair done in similar ways.

I tried to create a direct relationship between the lineage found among families.
The Title of this series is called "Lineage"

Foundations Showcase 2010

Last night was the fifth annual Foundations Showcase, in the art department. Work was displayed from all the foundations classes that has been created throughout the year.

The piece of mine that was displayed was this color drawing. The drawing is a still life like any other, however we had to use not black and white to create the image tbut instead use color. Now with black and white objects it was slightly difficult to achieve this. Using analogous colors and chromatic neutrals we created a piece that depicts the objects and their relative colors. The material used are Prismacolor Nu Pastels, Rembrandt Soft Pastels, and Prismacolor Colored Pencils.


Later in the evening the gave awards to the Freshmen Ten ( ten freshmen who portrayed a certain amount of technical skill, but also a certain level of leadership in class). At the end of the awards I was surprised by the Foundations Coordinator of NIU by an award named after me. I received the John Cheney service award for services and excellence in the school of art.

Fore!!

This past weekend I went with some friends to a minigolfing place around campus.


None of us were any good so I won't mention the scores but this picture might sum it up.
It was really fun and with finals drawing near it was a good way to unwind.

Einstein and Art

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
--Albert Einstein

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progess, giving birth to evolution."
-- Albert Einstein


I always knew Einstein was a smart guy.

"The Contemporary Human"

This drawing was to be a triptych. The goal of this project was to create a character that is interesting, compelling and rich wiith detail that dramatically displays a visual story using myself as the subject. We were assigned to create a self portrait, a landscape and a stil life and after the creation of each image we had to connect them in some way. The landscape is done using a building from NIU and the still life objects contain objects found in the art rooms at school.

Here is an image of all three drawings together:


Here is the landscape:

Here is the still life:

Here is the self portrait:

Skull of my Heart

In this next drawing we had to impose a skull into the drawing to create a certain feeling. The use of the skull was also used to begin familiarizing us with the proportions of the human anatomy of the face.

This assignment was all about concept. How does portraying a skull next to certain objects portray different ideas and feelings.

In this piece how does the addition of the skull affect the feeling of the piece without the addition of the hand of cards and the dice.

The medium of this piece is conte crayons used on gray tinted paper.

Romance with my Shoes.

The next assigment for my drawing class was titled by the teacher "Romance with My Shoes." The purpose of this assignment was to take the title for our previous assignmment (Dorm Life) for idea generation. Using objects that represent us we were to create a drawing showing our relationship with our "stuff" in this case my boot and my sweater.

I chose these items becasue it is the pinacle of dorm life to be grabbing things off of the floor and moving on with the activities for the day.

Woodcut Anyone

Ok here is the first project we had to do in printmaking. In this process we use the process of relief to create the image (any printing process in which the ink is transferred to paper from areas that are higher than the rest of the block). Using the technique of woodcut, I created a plate out of MDF wood that would create an image. We were allowed to use any image we liked so I used one of me lampworking.

The title of this piece is "Through the Flame"

New Semester, New Year, Better Teachers

Happy New Year! I still cant believe it is already 2010. With the new year comes some new classes andd particularly some new teachers. Last semester I wasnt particularly impressed with my teachers so when the semester ended I was relieved. Now I have much more exciting teachers and projects to look forward to. Such as this first drawing project:

In this drawing I was to use objects that I thought represented me at this point in time. The objects I used are: an NIU sweater, a boot, a power supply, a cup, a toolbox, and a brick wall. I'll let you decide why I chose these items.

The drawing's title is "Dorm Life"