Book Carving - We're All Stories in the End

I had a tough time trying to figure out what I was going to carve because I wanted to try to make my project stand out a bit.  I thought of a few good ideas but my favorite was the Tardis from one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who.  The Tardis was a similar shape to the book and I thought it would be a fun thing to create, so I got to work on designing it.  We were told to be really careful about what we cut out for each layer and don't leave any "islands" that would fall out which made me really nervous.  I had to make sure I wasn't cutting the wrong part out and stopped myself a few times before I cut a new layer out after my border so I wouldn't ruin the whole piece.  It was especially difficult for me to cut the smaller windows on the top because if I slipped, I would cut them into one big window and not be able to fix them.  I cut one or two pages doing that and had to hide some tape on the back of those layers so they would stay together.  The last thing I had to do to finish it was figure out how to get a little light to fit in the book but I came up with the idea of carving farther back into the book and fitting a doll light in there so it would be like the light in the show.  It was very tedious work and I wanted it to look like a mini replica of the real Tardis so I had to pay attention to detail and luckily for me, it worked out and I was able to mix the right blues together.  I took a risk with painting almost all of the book blue, but if I did it any other way, I highly doubt it would look just as nice.  I felt the book was a massive success and I was really excited when I found a quote from the show I could put on the cover that related really well to the theme of the project.  I wouldn't change a thing about my project and it's one of my favorite we've done this year.

Mixed Media - What Goes Around Comes Around

One of my favorite rides to go on when the fair comes to town is the Ferris Wheel, so I thought a great way to show amusement would be to make one for this project.  I used a variety of different colors and patterns in this to make it stand out, which also brightened up the piece.  First, for the background, I found some strange blue fabric and thought it'd be perfect for the sky.  I knew I needed to make the ground for the Ferris Wheel to stand on, so I used different shades of green tissue paper and glued the pieces onto the paper a certain way so they would stick up like grass would.  When it came to the spokes and the support legs, I found scrap papers with neat designs on them and decided to use them to help catch your eye.  Finally, when it was time to put the actual wheel and passenger cars on, I thought it would be a cool idea to find pictures of different cars from a variety of Ferris Wheels and put them all together to make one big wheel.  In my opinion it turned out pretty well, and to tie it all together and bring some more color into the piece, I added some outlines to each part using acrylic paint, and wrote the quote "what goes around comes around" around the ride.  The lessons we had in class showed me that it's okay to have different patterns that wouldn't usually go together in one piece, as long as they go with the theme.  I struggled a bit more with this project because I'm not used to using all different mediums like this and I felt conflicted on what exactly to make.  I even had to cover up a piece of cloth I was going to use because I started taking the picture in a different direction.  Once I decided what to do and finally covered the cloth up, I was able to move forward and finish the piece.