To create a PERFECT project

People often think that art majors have the easiest major on campus, and generally make fun of us constantly and crack jokes about how we study "Drawing Circles for Dummies" before any of our finals...but this is where they are wrong, our homework and finals are projects. And these projects equal hours and hours of our time along with large amounts of frustration and careful thinking. Art assignments can't just be thrown together with sloppy lines, smudges and a random color or two, it is a careful and tedious process, one which many don't ever master.

With any art project you have to come up with an idea. Something in which to place all your creative energy.

For this particular assignment I chose a shark as my grand idea. Not just any shark mind you, but rather cute blacktip reef shark, like the ones that I would swim with in Pohnpei.

The second step is to plan out your design, sticking one shark in the middle of the picture plan would never do, but perhaps if there were many sharks swimming together...perhaps then....

The picture will come together...currently there are several sharks swimming about on the picture plane...but one can't turn in an assignment on computer paper, the "design" of sorts needs to be transferred to a thicker and more stable piece of paper.

Light tables are a wonderful invention and by using one an artist will save precious time otherwise spent getting a headache while attempting to draw something just so. For this particular project I transferred the sharks over onto watercolor paper.

The time has now come to add color, for this project we were suppose to create a design/picture that showed Analogous Color Schemes (that means 3 colors on the color wheel that sit right next to each other), along with warm and cool colors. Now I didn't want to have to do two separate projects, one for warm colors and the other for cool. So I decided to combine them.

And here they are, happy blacktip reef sharks, who amazingly enough turn colors as soon as they cross the middle of the page. As you can see the warm analogous colors are orange, yellow-orange, and yellow. While the cool analogous colors are blue, blue-green, and green.

This project took roughly 4 hours to complete...but when you are striving to get an "A" on all your projects, it is time well worth it. :)