Making Stunning Artworks

Many of the stunning pieces of art found in books, art museums and the internet have captured peoples imagination. Something about them just stands out and they can be visually stunning with their good uses of colour, light, shading and emotion. A lot of skill and practice has gone towards creating them.



http://moreearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Ellen-Jewett-unique-sculptures-artwork-animals-11.jpg

This is a clay and wire frame fox by Ellen Jewett. It is covered in detail and wouldn't taken a lot of concentration to shape. Also planning the placement of all of the details would've been difficult. 

http://www.mrpilgrim.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Unique-Murals-Unusal-Street-Art_03-Shaka.jpg

This is a very colourful piece that has been painted onto a wall. Even the bottoms of the trees were included to connect the painting with reality. Something like this would've taken hours and hours to make. Spray painting is especially difficult. Especially when you need permission to paint of a wall. Most of the time you could be limited to large pieces of paper of cardboard.

One of my favourite artists, known on Deviantart as Grypwolf is a self taught artist from Finland. They use digital art as their main media and is very well known on the internet. Their artwork is highly detailed and professional. They can do cellshading (one below) and highly realistic drawings with soft shading.

They have had years of practice with shading and lighting. Along with learning to anatomy of the animals they draw and humans. The way the lines are drawn are neat and capture the emotion perfectly. It is surprising how hard it can be to drawn emotion.





http://grypwolf.deviantart.com/art/Jieknga-519373917

Model making and digital art

Model making and digital art have gotten big roles in the movie, videogames, animation and advertising industries. Digital art has also become a very popular hobby for many artists. Here's some info on them.


Sculptures/Model making

Some people like to make sculptures, These can be made out of clay, stone, wood, resin, upholstery foam etc. This is a good skill for making figurines for franchises or mask making. It is also a skill that is used to create vehicles and monsters to help film makers and video game companies to visualize their ideas.  This form of art takes a lot of 3 dimensional thinking so you can build the figure in your head and then create the figure in real life. This can be messy and VERY time consuming, so sculpting isn't for everyone.

Digital 2D Art

Digital art is one of the more recent forms of art. It is more technical than your ordinary pen and eraser. Erasing mistakes and creating symmetry is easy but actually drawing perfect lines is something that is difficult. It is also not a cheap hobby with buying the right drawing program, a fast HD computer and  a decent tablet for drawing with. Although I simply use a Samsung galaxy note 10.1 2014 tablet along with a €3 drawing app called artflow. The  drawing tablets that don't have their own digital screens are the most affordable and the most used. It takes a lot of practice to improve your hand eye coordination so you can actually draw properly! You will start of drawing like a frustrated penguin but eventually you will get better with practice. Digital art can be very rewarding and is used to make the fantasy art that you see on game advertisements and much more!

Animation
Animation is using multiple drawn pictures to create movement. This is primarily done digitally but a few people still do it traditionally with paper and pencil. Animation is something that a few people may want to do but do not have the patience or time. Each frame is very similar to the last so you feel like your drawing the same picture over and over again. 40 frames can create a 4 second animation. This can vary a little depending on how smooth you want the animation or how quickly you make the animation move from frame to frame. The slowest part is colouring all of the frames in with the right colours. Then a small amount of shading is added to make the animation a higher quality. They don't add too much shading though because that would take to long and it is the final step in colouring in animation. Animation studios have teams of people animating and a landscape artist to make the backgrounds using acrylic paint. There are animators in Japan called "Sakuga." These animators animate entire scenes on their own and are payed a huge amount of money. They create very high quality animations too since Japan has a huge animation industry. 5 minutes of animation will take a Sakuga way over a year to finish.

History of Art

The earliest form of art are from the Paleolithic period. This is when humans hunted and gathered food. They would create cave paintings to tell stories about their hunts and what happened. Pictures of animals and humans can be seen on these cave walls. They used burned bones, charcoal or ground calcite mixed with animal fat to make paint. They would use a hollow bone as a tool for spraying paint. They would place paint inside and then blow through the bone. Cave people would place their hand onto the wall and then spray the paint onto their hand. This leaves the print of their hands on the wall.

http://foodoncanvas.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/cave-painting-and-steve-jobs.gif

Then in the Neolithic period, people started to farm. They created cave paintings but with humans and animals shown living in harmony. They also used more advanced materials for craft such as jasper, quartz and amber. Later on it moved to the metal ages. Iron swords and spears were created and decorated with copper.


The pyramids of Egypt are another form of art made when the Egyptians were still around. These massive structures contain sculptures and shine made out of gold and other materials. The walls have writing and pictures drawn into them. They would create sculptures and statues to honour their Pharoah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_art#/media/File:All_Gizah_Pyramids.jpg



Then came the Renaissance which was a very important time for Art. Famous artists from this era include Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael. People now understood anatomy much better because they were aloud to dissect donated bodies. Paintings became more realistic, perspective was added, soft shading (sfumato) and more natural backgrounds were used. Compared to medieval time painting where the more important people were bigger compared to the other people in the painting and perspective did not exist. The backgrounds were made up of man made objects and places. The people in the Medieval painting also had no emotion on their face and there was little use of shading and lighting.

http://www.westcler.org/gh/curlessmatt/arthistory/13/daVinciMonaLisa1503-06.jpg

Hello!

My name is Kate and this is my blog on the geography of Art. Art is something made by humans since the dawn of time! Art can be an activity or a material object. Today there are many forms of art so there is an art for everyone!