Art - A WEE PORTFOLIO

Capturing Moments through Drawing, Photography,
and Sculpture

After quitting formal art classes in 5th grade, the last art class I took before Spring 2013 was in middle school. These are just some selections of classwork and related things over the past couple of months. Enjoy!

spring 2014: Sculpture II

My inspiration for most of my work this semester comes from Sayaka Ganz and Deborah Butterfield-- two artists who are able to create sculptures that look like they're in motion. To me, branch/wood thickness in sculpture is like line thickness and texture in gesture drawings. Personal goal: Make sculptures look like they're in constant motion using various materials, like branches and foam.

Fish 'n' sticks. Addressing motion through sculpture through the use of branches. (Some parts in the picture are really there to help hold the form as the wood dries.)

Fish, modified and captured from a different angle.

I learned from the first fish (to the left) that the main branch led to most of the character of the sculpture, and decided to try again.

A successfully cast bronze octopus! (I don't have an image of what the wax looked like, though.)

Carlos and Andrew in action, pouring molten bronze

The fish, complete in a ceramic shell mold! (The mold was made for us by a foundry in Boston because we weren't allowed to melt out the wax or perform the organic burnout at Wellesley.) Unfortunately due to a number of reasons, the piece didn't turn out.

Some of the other ceramic shell molds ready to be buried in sand for pouring

Squid made out of hobby airplane foam (after many attempts at bending balsa wood)

Fall 2013: Sculpture I

One of the first sculptures of a live model (09/13/13)

Figure modeling in early October (we look at the figure every Friday)

Sculpture from 10/18/2013

10/14/13. Not officially part of Sculpture, but I was inspired by this skull-shaped pumpkin at the pumpkin patch and just had to come back and sculpt it (with my handy swiss army knife)

Learning the basics of bronze casting

Progression of the cube.... (Original cube in background, cube I was much happier with in foreground.) Not only did we have to shape a perfect cube from scratch but we also had to make it possible to be made with a sand mold (no undercuts!) One of my classmates said it reminded her of tetris (That might have been what I was thinking subconsciously since I am working on a tetris-playing robot arm.)

10/22/13: The sculpture above didn't survive the molding process because the clay had dried out (despite my attempt to cover it in furniture wax). I remade the cube, cast a mold out of plaster a few weeks ago, and today we cleaned the molds, coated them with Murphy's oil soap as a mold release, and created a positive plaster piece that we can now make pretty and eventually use for sand molding.

Our two instructors pouring molten bronze into my sand mold for my bronze fish

Cube, fresh out of the sand mold

Cube, after much grinding and polishing

Cube @ end of class 12/3

cube @ end of class 12/3

Fish after some nice polishing, ready for fins to be welded on.

Fish, fresh out of the mold

Spring 2013: Drawing I at Wellesley

Drawing I was my first exposure to drawing since I stopped taking art classes in 7th grade. I forgot how awesome it was to have a release from the engineering/technical worlds! This is my final project, which was a study of people and motion, complete with a final sketch that contrasted the permanence of the inanimate objects as well as the flow of people within the robotics lab that I'm a part of.