In a nutshell, the Memory Project is an organization that provides student artists with images children around the world in orphanages or foster care, which the artists then turn into artworks so the children have something to cherish as they grow up and so that they can have something positive to look back on when they think about their time in the orphanage or foster care. I have taken part in the Memory Project for 3 years, soon to be 4, and this has been my experience with it and how I have made my works:
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For those of you who are not aware, I, a 3D artist, have to learn how to paint on an AP level by next fall, and I am currently trying to teach myself how to paint.
For some context: I am not experienced with painting on a flat surface beyond the occasional painting I did with my grandmother when I was very young and I do not think of anything as being strictly two dimensional, so even just the idea of painting or making other 2D artworks is a difficult thing for me to wrap my head around. Most of this difficulty is caused by how restrained I feel in 2D artworks and the seemingly endless sets of rules with painting and having a very defined boarder where you either have to stop or hope you can make it flow nicely between two canvases, where as in 3D artworks, there is little to no limit outside of my budget and the size of a kiln. There are many reasons why I have not been writing much lately, and the biggest ones are that 1) I have been trying to learn how to paint on an AP level by myself, 2) I have been working to get my gallery uploaded for you guys (check it out here), 3) I have finals next week so I have been cramming for those, 4) I just took my AP statistics test last week and I obviously had been spending a lot of my time studying for that, and 5) I am trying to clean up my art room which as of now looks like the after math of a tornado going through a Michael's store with a Home Depot next to it (the AP deadlines left me with so little time and motivation to clean up so I didn't, and I regret it, but not as much as I would have regretted putting everything away every night only to take it all back out in the morning). So I do offer you, the beloved Creature Readers, my honest apology and the promise that I will be trying harder than ever to upload more content for all of you to, hopefully, enjoy and learn from, or laugh at because I am some random person online with mediocre advice that for some reason is trying to help people online.
The struggle most artists end up facing at some point is having a lot of paint and not knowing what to with it. Some may go with shoving it a bucket, or throwing them all on a shelf, or maybe just leaving random stashes of paint in every corner of every surface. The problem with these systems is that you have to almost completely undo them in order to find a certain paint or drag a surprisingly heavy bucket out and dig through it like a mole that just got pepper sprayed. Either way, the organization of your paints will never remain neat nor will it be easy to find any shade you want.
The struggle that many artists face is the struggle of hard, crusty paint brushes. Whether you wash them immediately after use, use brush conditioners, and/or forget about them until 6 days after you use them and the acrylic on them is now fully dry (this is normally what happens to me), somehow paint brushes end up hard as a rock. After having to throw away far too many brushes, I decided to try and salvage them. This is what I have discovered works to soften both the paint and the bristles:
If you have work in ceramics you almost certainly have had some glaze that doesn't want to work the way it says it does. Some glazes seem to be more prone to this than others, the blue glazes from AMACO Potters Choice Brush-on Glazes have been the most finicky and unreliable in my experience, and the AMACO Low Fire Gloss Glazes being the most reliable. But sometimes no matter what you do, they just want to turn out horribly. Here is what you can do when this happens:
If you find yourself in a rigorous art course (such as AP studio arts), you will at some point find yourself needing to turn something in when you have nothing. You can always take the route of turning in a half done piece but that is a highly frowned upon idea by most. So you are left trying to make an artwork in one night: go buy a stash of your favorite caffeine delivery device, start a non-engrossing TV show/YouTube series/podcast/music, find a work space where no one will bother you and force yourself to art. (Yes, art is a verb to me, if you have a problem with it go art yourself) These are some of the things I do when I am trying to meet a tight deadline. Since you are probably in a time crunch right now, I am going to keep this post fairly short, so here we go:
Warning: This post will be more of a personal rant/story-time than useful information
I have been a member of my high school's art team for 3 years now and every spring we go to 2 art competitions: one that is open to all medias at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the other being a national competition that is only open to 2-D art. There are limits on how many pieces you can send to each, I do not know how many it is for the national competition but for my school I think it is roughly 2 dozen and for the M.I.A. competition I believe the limit is 18 pieces. What is 'artist's block'? It is exactly what it sounds like: when an artist can't think of what to do next. Every artist will get it at some point, so here is how I get past it (as well as how some other artists get over it):
I have tried so many things that are labeled as sealers from art supply stores and they all had a two major things in common: They cost an arm and a leg and only last for two all over applications. As a broke person (like most artists) these were major problems for me. I needed to find a sealer that was cheap and lasts a long time. I tried pretty much everything I could think of and find easily. Here are my rankings from best to worst:
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Cinder Blackwater
An artist who is constantly looking for new things or new ways to use old things. Honest to a fault. As frugal as a broke college student. Individuals in the Creature Family
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