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"