Showing posts with label pineapples. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pineapples. Show all posts

20120914

A Pineapple Year

The artworks shown below are the calendar pages I designed for this year. Its for my AEP coursework and the purpose of it is to reflect on my (last) year in NYGH. I guess it's a little like a monthly diary of sorts? Each page was a watercolor painting (except October, which is done in poster color and acrylic), lined with a thin marker and occasionally touched up with white pen. I say 'was' because they were all scanned into the computer and I did some light photoshop (my photoshop skills suck) before it was sent for printing. On each page, there is also a small pineapple sculpture made of air-dried clay, painted with a mixture of paints (poster, watercolor, acrylic) and varnished. Each month has a theme and so does each pineapple. I also found quotes on the internet and added one to each month. I think I'm more or less satisfied with my work though I feel that I could have done better if I improved on my watercolor skills and photoshop skills.


January: Chinese New Year~!
Pineapple type: Eat Me


February: Valentine's Day, Science Practical Trials
Pineapple type: Split-skin (a representation of stress and contradiction)


March: GRACES, School hols, Exams
Pineapple type: Enzyme and Substrate/Masquerade (depends on how you want to interpret it)


April: Birthdays and Exams
Pineapple type: Strangled in ribbons (representing both of the above)


May: Relaxation (start of school hols)
Pineapple type: Ice-cream-eating


June: Holiday
Pineapple type: Akuma (representing the enjoyment of anime/manga... and my birthday--because my friends nickname me Akuma)


July: More exams
Pineapple type: Strangled by snake (the horrors of Biology?)


August: National Day (Singapore)
Pineapple type: National Day Parade (NDP)


September: Burning midnight oil (studying)
Pineapple type: Burnt-out candle


October: Final Exam's a war game
Pineapple type: Octopus ('cuz of the super busy month)


November: The End is coming, Autumn (though Singapore has no autumn)
Pineapple type: Mad Hatter (let the fun begin!)


December: Christmas
Pineapple type: Queen of Hearts ('cuz a friend of mine once played the Queen of Hearts in an Odyssey of the Mind (OM) performance and her birthday is on the 25th, and the Queen of Hearts could also represent love?)

That's all. Unfortunately the lighting isn't very good and some parts have shadows where there shouldn't be shadows while some parts are too bright. Maybe I should have taken the photos of my artwork at somewhere where the lighting is even? Hm... 


20120730

Pineapple Invasion I

Okay, so I know I've been stalling, and I shouldn't stall any more... I hope nobody minds that I didn't photoshop my art much cuz I'm no good at digital art. Besides, I think I prefer to preserve these pineapples in their original form, like how they look like on my pineapple aep notebook, since that's how I remember them as and would like to remember them as (memories~). The notebook was originally meant for my aep (Art Elective Program) notes, but I only wrote my notes on one side of the paper, so I began to doodle on the other side of the paper. I can only tell when I started the series by checking my notes... and since my first notes were about Expressionism, which was what we learnt in sec2, I must have began my series around then. There are 40 pages of pineapple drawings in total, with 300 pineapple drawings. I won't be showing all the pages though, maybe just 30+ pages, and I'll be separating this into 7 posts, which each post showing around 4 to 5 pages of pineapples.

Enough with the babbling. Here's the first page:


Though the pineapples drawn here aren't very nice, but hey, I just started. And I'm showing this page cuz I think I should show how my very first pineapples looked like and how the whole series started. The number written beside the pineapples can be kind of misleading... it doesn't show the order in which the pineapples were drawn--the numbers are just for me to keep track of the pineapples I've drawn. The first pineapple depicted is, well, a normal pineapple, albeit simplified and cartoon-ified. Most of my pineapples are like that--the only features that define them as a pineapple are the round-ish shape of the pineapple's body, the spiky leaves on top and the criss-cross lines/pattern that represent the spiky "scaled"-skin of a pineapple. The themes of the other pineapples are as follows: Shot by an arrow (with juice spurting out like blood); Drowning; Sliced (for eating); Roasted over a flame; Cycling/Fleeing; Vampire Pineapple; =_=||| Pineapple; Grim Reaper Pineapple; Giant Pineapple. I guess I could have edited those pineapple drawings of mine, but I wanted to preserve how awful they were when I first started drawing them (so that I can point at them at a later date and laugh). Lolz.

'Kay, so here's the next page:


So the pineapples have gotten more gruesome... I know. The first pineapple depicted there (no. 66) is simply about a pineapple splitting its skin into half. Inspirations: Evil clowns. That pineapple was the one that really got me into continuing the pineapple drawings and in the end, turning it into a series. This isn't actually the original. The original was much nicer (my originals are always nicer... I can't seem to draw a perfect copy of anything) but it was drawn on the whiteboard and had to be erased later... so I drew a copy of it into my pineapple notebook later. After having drawn it on the whiteboard, some of my classmates began to leave comments beside it (we're an aep class, in case you haven't realized that by now) and most of them seemed to like the pineapple... so I drew some more. The themes of the other pineapples are: Partial-disembowelment/decapitation; Dissolving; Soul-fly-away-shock; Rotten pineapple; Devil; Angel; Bloody cactus; Disgust; Carnivore; Shattering-self. That last shattering pineapple is one that I like a lot, mainly beside this was my first (and last) time that I was able to draw out such an effect nicely. As for what any of these pineapples mean, well, I'll leave them to your interpretation, cuz I never really meant them to mean anything.

This is the third page in the notebook:


The first pineapple depicted here was inspired by a typical anime flowers-appearing-out-of-nowhere-in-the-background scene that usually takes place when the character is in a really gay (definition: cheerful, merry, "high") mood. The next few are mostly inspired by natural stuff. The themes are: Rainy day; Pineapples everywhere; Hot springs; Eskimo; Night; Music; Sunburnt; Tornado/Hurricane; Lightning strike; Um.... I think no. 65 should be... tweeting? Like "fishing"? But "fishing" for birds that leave behind text as they fly past? yeah... one of the few pineapples that has a proper meaning behind its drawing. 

Moving on to the fourth page... also the second-last page for this post:


The first drawing depicts a pineapple using a sparkler (you know, the long colorful stick you light up with a flame and it starts shooting out sparks like a mini firework?) to um... that's a snail by the way. The drawing was inspired by the time when my cousins and I were celebrating the Mid-Autumn Fest and we found out that if one holds a sparkler very near a snail, first, it'd retreat back into its shell, then the slimy thing in its shell i.e. the snail will start to bubble and uh... yeah. And the shell will start to form grey-white stuff that could be ashes and... I shall not say anymore about killing/torturing innocent creatures. The next few pineapple themes are: Stuck in time (hourglass) (YES!!! another pineapple drawing with a proper meaning behind it!!); Accidents; The Scream (by Munch): pineapple version; Food chain; Wanderer Above the Mist (by Friedrich): pineapple version; La Musique (by Matisse): pineapple version. No. 26, no. 28 and no. 29, as you can see, are inspired by some of the artworks I learnt about during aep. 

Now, the last (but not least) page for this post:


As you can see, most of these pineapples have been inspired by the school stuff. The first pineapple was inspired by physics. P.E. stands for Potential Energy and K.E. stands for Kinetic Energy. If you want to continue digging into the meaning behind this pineapple drawing, well, look at what its doing and you can see how that links to my idea of physics at that time: "suicide". Haha. And the next pineapple was inspired by the idea I picked up from the net about paintings coming to life. And there's the barcode pineapple. And the pineapple that got sucked into the stuff it was writing. The last pineapple drawing was inspired by chemistry. And yes, both my pineapples AND Chemistry are EVIL.

Hm. That's all for now... Will post another few pages up soon... Do not ask me to define 'soon'.