This is an exercise in designing using shapes and basic design rules.

This is an exercise in designing using both shapes and lines. The result looks a little organic.

This is an exercise in colour and value. Each student was given a square piece cut from a photocopy of a black and white photo. We were supposed to match the value in the photo, but use whatever colours we want to depict a different picture. I got the top right piece, which is the corner of the window of a house with a dirty-ish wall. My design was some bird prints on some maple leafs over a blend of rainbow colours. If you squint at it, the bird prints and leafs should disappear, and only the value changes will be prominent.

This exercise was to take a primary colour, and paint variations of it (I chose blue, so I used colours from blue greens to purples). We also had to add a bit of complimentary colour to the picture. I wanted to paint a pinecone, so I did. I guess it turned out okay.

This exercise was in mixing and visualizing colours and getting across the idea of transparency. The idea is that each patch of colour would act as a colour transparency sheet (forgot the technical name), so when they overlap, the overlapped region would be the colour of those 2 sheets overlapped together. This is actually not that trivial, since the resulting colour is NOT just taking equal amount of paints and mixing them. For example, if you have 2 equal value sheets and put them on top of each other, the result would be in a darker shade. We had a sheaf of coloured sheets we could check against, and I think the results for this painting was fairly accurate.

There is also a black frame painted around it, but I cropped it out since the painting in the photo taken wasn't quite rectangular.

This is another exercise on transparency. The painting is a still life of plastic cups filled with water coloured with food colouring on a white palette. And yes, the rims of the cups were round! The challenge is in the interaction of the colours with each other. For whatever dumb reason, I decided to do a sort of textured background, so then I had to make the way my cups look to match. I like how the green glass turned out, but not crazy about the rest of it.

This is one of those self portrait things they make you do in introductory art courses. I hate painting people. We were supposed to emulate an artist. The one I chose was Magritte, since I like a lot of his paintings. He had this one painting (attempting the impossible) of him with a woman. The woman looked solid but he is actually painting her in the scene. I took the idea and reversed it. As a protest to painting self protraits, I painted myself staring out a window and then painted paint brushes painting myself out. Thanx to my friend Linda for suggesting floating paint brushes! I use 2 mirrors to get the angle, which is from the side, looking up slightly. I'm told it actually kind of looks like me, but I guess you'll just have to verify with a photo of me (if you can find one in my web page!).

I don't really like collages, but we had to do one that shows the past month in our lives. Since I'm in computer science and it was the last month in the term, I was very busy working on my artificial intelligence project and the last splines assignment (anyone who had taken CS679 might recognize those diagrams). My diet was mostly coke, mars bars, and chips. The other half of my life consists of my ferrets, of course, and mending things for them with duct tape. Now that I think about it, I probably should have just filled 3/4 of the board with the litter they use.