Altamuro



I have always loved working with contrast. My favorite medium is pencil and just working with shading. I could do it for hours, and I have been known to. My partner, Roberto and I thought it would be fun to trace our friends and paint the shapes they leave, alternating between black and white and then paint the overlapping sections gray.
 * Quarter One.**

Roberto and I started by measuring out paper that we thought would be large enough for our friends to spread out on. Then we asked them to lay down on the paper in whatever position they wanted, and we traced them. We mixed white and black paint to make gray and outlined the traces and painted in where each person overlapped. We then alternated between painting each person black or white. We did not have enough time to complete the background this quarter, so we will be finishing this piece next quarter.

This piece was made first in pencil and the done over in white and black tempera paint, on paper.

This piece of art started out just being something fun to do, and something aesthetically pleasing. But, it really does remind me of my friends and how different we all are, but somehow we all get along. This painting has been really fun to do so far, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.


 * Quarter Two.**





At the beginning of this quarter, Roberto and I completed the project that we had begun in the start of the first quarter. We painted the background blue and painted our friends' hands various colors and patterns and printed them scattered on the background.



For the rest of the quarter, I worked alone on a piece that wasn't quite as meaningful or fun to do, but I still enjoyed doing it. I thought it might be fun to work with yarn and paint and eventually splattering the paint, so i did just that.

I started with a huge ball of yarn, some glue and some paper. I painted glue onto the surface of the paper and spiraled the yarn to make three circles identical in size, and later one half size and one quartered. This took much longer than you would think. Then, I mixed up different paint colors to paint the yarn circles. When they were colored and dry, I pasted them onto a large piece of black paper and then splattered white paint mixed with water across the top.

This piece was made with yarn, glue, and tempera paint on paper.

This piece does not have any special, deep meaning to me. It was just a piece that combined a bunch of different methods and mediums that I had been wanting to try.



This quarter I didn't really have much of a plan for what I wanted to do, like in the previous quarters. Because of this, I would do different things almost everyday. A recurring theme in my daily projects was painting shade scales. I painted one in blue, pink, purple, green and teal. Another type of piece that I created with paint was just a mess of colors. Collaboratively, Roberto and I are still working on another piece that is a splattered tile grid. Also, Danielle Duncan and I worked on a sculpture that is still in progress.
 * Quarter 3.**

To make the shade scales, I took a piece of paper and marked off stripes in equal sections with a pencil and a ruler. Then I would pick a color of paint, whatever fit best with my mood that day, and paint the first stripe. As I moved on the the next stripe, I would continually keep adding more white paint to the original shade. For the collage-like paintings, I would pick a few colors that I liked, smooth them onto the paper and paint other colors on top, mixing them, to see what I would come up with. Roberto and I mixed six colors that we liked, making them very vibrant and splattered them onto pieces of paper that we had painted black. Danielle and I got some clay from Ms. Echols and sculpted it into the shape that we wanted, them we covered the piece with candy wrappers.

The paintings were made with tempera paint and paper, and sometimes a pencil and a ruler. The sculpture was made with clay, water and candy wrappers.

Painting always makes me feel relaxed and helps me to think more clearly, so painting the shade scales especially helped me to re-collect my thoughts and de-stress. The sculpture was just something fun that Dani and I had wanted to do.

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**Quarter 4.**
This quarter I and a few friends did a collaborative series titled "You Are What You Eat." We took large rolls of paper and wrapped volunteers up as different foods. It was one of the largest scale 3-dimensional projects I have ever done. It took a lot of time but it was very fun and we all laughed a lot while doing it. Another collaborative piece that I was a part of this quarter was a mural that was started but never finished. Ashley Melendez, Roberto Albano and I worked on this mural with tracings of ourselves that we were going to fill with newspaper clippings, work that we had done this year and a list of all of the people that currently attend SLA. The first few pictures in this slide show, (as you can probably tell) are neither. Those are pieces that I did on my own while brainstorming to figure out what projects we wanted to do this quarter. I find it easier to concentrate when I am doodling and I was relatively proud of how these "doodles" came out.

To make the doodles, I simply set my marker tip to the paper and let it do what it wanted. There was no rhyme, reason or pattern in these drawings. To make the mural, Ashley, Roberto and I took paper laid down on it and traced ourselves in pencil. We then went over those tracings in three different colors, each our favorites. Ashley was outlined in pink, Roberto in blue, and myself in green. We then began to fill those outlines with newspaper, work and list but the end of the year came up on us and we were unable to finish. To make the "You Are What You Eat"s We picked a food for the day and wrapped a volunteer up in large paper to resemble that food. It was a really fun process that gathered a lot of attention in the hallways.

The brainstorming doodles were simply done with markers on paper. The mural was done with pink, blue and green tempera paint on paper with the addition of newspaper and papers printed on plain printer paper. The "You Are What You Eat" project was done with only paper and tape... and people.

The doodles were just something to help me get my creative juices flowing at the beginning of the quarter. The mural was a spin off of the first mural that Roberto and I had done at the beginning of the year but we wanted this one to reflect all that we had accomplished this year. It also represented to us the misrepresentation that our school has as a "paperless school." We thought there would be almost no papers at all when we first came to this school, but we were wrong. This project would have been the epitome of a "waste of paper" put to good use. The food was one of the most enjoyable projects that I have done this year. It may seem silly but we took "you are what you eat" very seriously. It started out with my yearning to "wrap someone up like a taco" for fun, but we as SLA students never just simply do things, we go all out! We added tomatoes, olives, meat lettuce and cheese inside Teila's tortilla wrap and we had so much fun with it that we decided to make a series out of it. I think sometimes the best pieces arise from spontaneity. It sure was the case with this one!