I did art for two years in sixth form and I was recently organising all of my old work and thought it might be a cool idea to share with you some of my favourite pieces from my two years of art. Over the two years I was given 5 different projects; Alice In Wonderland, Day of the Dead, Margate and Portraits. The final project consisted of combining four different art movements to create new pieces; the movements I went for were surrealism, Gothic, folk and shock art. These projects all had to include workbooks, artist studies and research, sketches, experiments and final pieces, which showed our research and initial ideas and how our ideas grow whilst experimenting with different mediums, and how our final pieces came to be. Keep on scrolling down to see which pieces were my favourite from these projects.
Surrealism, Gothic, Folk and Shock
This is a final piece from my last art project. I combined surrealism with Gothic statues that I photographed at a graveyard to create this big painting .
This is another final piece where I pasted a photograph that I had taken at a graveyard onto a piece of scrap cardboard and used acrylic paint to blend the photograph into the painting. This is my favourite out of the four final pieces we had to create for this project.
These two paintings of statues were done early on in the project, which became consistent characters in the rest of this art project. The statue with the goat skull head was a figure I created to add some surrealism to the project.
Here are some first sketches I did at the beginning of the project where I was experimenting with what characters and what mythical features I wanted to use in my project. I continued using dragon wings, horns and unicorn horns on various statues for an element of surrealism.
Day of the Dead
This is a mod rock skull on a big piece of cardboard with primary coloured splats so the piece ties in with the rest of the project. I went for a less traditional Day of the Dead skull with this project as everyone else in my class opted for sugar skulls.
This is the final piece for the Day of the Dead project, which was inspired by the view from a kaleidoscope, with nontraditional skulls. This piece was made using a stencil and spray diffuser with ink, acrylic paint, tissue paper and a hot glue gun.
This piece was created with a lino print of a skull onto squares of tissue paper which I then collaged together. I used a lot of lino prints and tissue paper in this project.
This kaleidoscopic piece was made with coloured ink in a spray diffuser. This was the main focus for the project and a lot of other pieces were based off of this idea.
Portraits
This is the final piece for my Portraits project, where my main focus was on afterlife and suffering (cheery I know). I used a hot glue gun to create 3D wounds on my final piece to give the portrait a textured element.
These paintings and drawings are my favourite part of the Portraits project. I was inspired a lot my Tim Burtons style of characters, hence why they all have dark hair and long, pointed faces. I looked a little into vampires here because they have no afterlife as they are immortal.
Here is an early piece drawn in pastels, I was required to use different mediums and show how I would stylise my portraits for different audiences.
Alice in Wonderland
One of my favourite pieces I've done, this is a study (I basically copied) of an original Tim Burton watercolour of his Mad Hatter from the Alice in Wonderland movie. I love his watercolours, which is why I wanted to do a study of it.
I looked into typography for this project and experimented in ways I could use quotes from Alice in Wonderland in my pieces.
Here are some Tim Burton inspired drawings of more Alice in Wonderland characters using watercolour pencils. I used the drawing of Alice on multiple pieces for this project.
Margate
My first art project was about my hometown, Margate, so we had to focus on some of the popular and famous buildings in Margate. I used the Margate clock tower in a lot on my pieces, like in this watercolour painting.
As this was the first art project we were given, I found it to be my worst project as I didn't know quite what we were marked on etc and now I hate a lot of the work. But here is one of my only sketches for the Margate project, which features some Margate landmarks and Jamie Reid inspired font.
So there we go, my favourite art pieces from my two years of A-Level art. Did you like any of them? Leave me a comment below so I know which pieces you liked best. Thank you for reading guys!
India X