Final Project


My Final work is inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. I’m particularly interested in the last few scene of the masterpiece.

The man stayed in the space station for the rest of his life until he passed away. I love the decoration in the room, which is clean and a combination of traditional style and technology. I wanted to create this emptiness in the space station in my first draft of the final. So I originally wanted to paint five pictures showing a day in space station, using only blue white and black. But the downside is the theme is a bit flat.

So I changed my mind to completely constructing my own story of a spaceman. So here comes the first draft of the second picture of my final.It is referred to this painting.

I want to place a window showing the beautiful space. I later found it so important in composition that I keep enlarging the window sizeĀ  and in final draft, I made it a French window.

I did some research on the hibernation pod. I want to keep it simple. I also want to let the audience know there is someone just came out of the pod without drawing the man. So I tried to make the smoky effect around the pod. Then I also added two more repeating pod to emphasize on this point.

My last picture is quite a happy coincidence. At first I was really confused on how to paint a expression with brush, then I decided to experiment with some fast dry brush stoke above the base color. It works! And it surprisingly worked well on reflection.

Week 6-7 Textures Box

Our theme is the adventure of a lonely child. We intentionally used unrealistic groovy color scheme under the texture. The warmness of pink and the aggressive orange pops up from the cooler base color purple. They represent the wild imagination of the child. However, with the character hidden in the darkest area of the box and blended into the background of the painting, we wanted to show the loneliness that the character is feeling.

Week 3 Colour

I forgot to take my own picture so I can only use these photos to show my work on this week. Mines are the one right below the angry sign in the first photo, the one in the top left corner in the second and the third, and the one with purple background in the last one. The lesson I learnt from here is contrast color can be used to express strong emotion and the less contrast color scheme can be used to create a peaceful or low-spirit environment.

Week 2 Harmony

The five pictures story is originated from my dream. I had a dream of fighting inside a dungeon like I’m a video game character, and when finally I crawled out of the dungeon which normally would lead to a victory scene, I began to fall freely in the sky. I could even fly without any wings, but on the ground there were thousands of monsters even worse than the ones inside the dungeon. Then after I found somewhere to land, I immediately crawled back to the dungeon to hide myself from monsters.

I tried to use the size contrast to create depth and sense of nervousness in my first two pictures. But I agreed that the contrast is not enough. The third one is my favourite. Third one and forth one all used a nearly symmetric composition, but I added some asymmetry to make it more interesting.

Week 1 – Papercut 101

This is the first time I’m doing serious paper-cut. At first it’s frustrating to deal with the shadow and small shapes in the original photo. Then Instead of focusing on the light and shadow, I tried to focus more on the texture and weight of the objects. So for the cloud I chose a flowing texture, and for the ground I chose a solid black with same grains on it (However in the final version I didn’t cut out the grains, because I think they will tend to attract more attention than it should be. The most challenging part is the people and the trees, which both had very complicated outline shapes.