A pen/acrylic/tape drawing I did when we had a model in class this year. 

Current Concentration

For senior year, I am taking AP Studio Art again, but I will be submitting a drawing portfolio this time. I am currently working on my concentration, which features various skulls/bones on book pages. I was and always am greatly inspired by Georgia O'Keiffe and have always been fascinated by the American Southwest and deserts, so I wanted to create a body of work that paid homage to all of that. I wanted to keep the subject matter/theme and medium all relatively simple, but the layout and design of the skulls will vary. 

Medium: gouche, gold paint, paper

I drew this piece, titled “Paper Dinosaur,” for my eighth grade drawing class. Our assignment was to draw a crumpled piece of paper, and I knew that the rest of my class would draw a ball of paper, so I decided to shape my paper into a dinosaur, one of my favorite creatures. It took me over four hours to complete, but to this day, I am still so happy and proud of the result, and it is one of my favorite pieces I have created. 

This piece is one of my parents’ and friends’ favorite pieces. It was selected as one of three pieces to represent my school in an art contest hosted by Congressman Adam Schiff. I made this in ninth grade, when I was taking the painting elective offered at my school. Our art teacher wanted us to use newspaper as the main medium, but I wanted to push the unconventionality of medium even more and ended up using glue as paint as well. Other medium included watercolor, oil pastel, crayon, and acrylic paint, but the glue was able to create the bodily fluid-like appearance that I wanted to convey to correlate with the heart. I cut out key words and headlines that were about natural disasters, murders, accidents, etc. because I wanted to stick with the theme and title that I had come up with before I even began the painting: “Heart Attack.” I really enjoyed creating this because it was the first time I had truly experimented with more unconventional materials as well as reached out to creating more abstract work. 

Photography has always been a favorite medium of mine because I feel that you do not need amazing technical skill or natural talent to become a great photographer - it is a medium that many people can relate to. This is a photograph I took of my brother at night; I like that it looks like he is being sucked into a tunnel, creating a more dynamic atmosphere to the photograph. 

This piece was for an AP art assignment from junior year, titled “Surreal Self Portrait.” I found it difficult to create something purely surreal, like work of Dali or Magritte, so I decided to create a more unconventional self portrait. My hair is a defining feature, so I wanted to draw attention to that. The medium is graphite on paper. 

This is a pen drawing of a skull that I created, inspired by the repeating line imagery of Frank Stella. I am drawn and constantly inspired by simplicity and minimalism, so I always strive to create the biggest impact through the least amount of shapes, colors, etc. 

For my AP Studio Art class last year, I had to produce a portfolio of 24 pieces, 12 for the breadth section and 12 for my concentration. I decided to create a 2D design portfolio, which meant that I could include more abstract and graphic-design oriented work. This piece is one of my concentration pieces. My theme was abstracting photographs - I always felt that photography made images seem so flat and boring, so I wanted to create unexpected movement through overlapping images, twisting photographs, and creating wave-like motion throughout my twelve concentration pieces. 

In this piece, I photographed a succulent plant, cut the same image into strips, and layered the strips to mirror the original image, creating a more dynamic, optical-illusion-like feel to an otherwise flat image. 

This is another piece from my concentration. Using a photo that I took of the Eiffel Tower, I cut repeating spheres and re-glued the image back together, slightly shifting each sphere to create a swirled, optical image. 

I received a score of 4 out of 5 for my 2-D AP Studio Art portfolio. 

Along with drawing and painting, I also enjoy creating t-shirt designs. Several of my school’s clubs have approached me for designs. This is my favorite design so far - it was for last year’s slam poetry competition held at my school. It was originally black on white, but when I went to get the shirts made, I thought that the white on black design would stand out more and make a bigger impact. The slam team used this design for the shirts as well as the backdrop for the stage. 

This is a t-shirt design I created for my school’s Men’s Service League (MSL) club.

This is an untitled drawing of a cow skull that I created over the span of three weeks for my AP art class junior year. I used a large piece of colored construction paper and colored pencils and charcoal for this piece.