Hamersvelding

So we picked the Sacred Rain Arrow sculpture for our project, partly because Native American heritage is a major defining feature of Tulsa and of Oklahoma as a whole, and partly because the sculpture itself is extremely striking and memorable.

For the art style, we have chosen to try and emulate John Hammersveld's work. We found his bold, bright colours and his clean, crisp style very appealing. In addition, there is a clear synergy between the Olympic athlete in Hammersveld's mural and the warrior of the Sacred Rain Arrow sculpture. 

For our general idea sketch, we found a gorgeous, dynamic image of the sculpture that we thought worked very nicely for a tabloid size poster. However, it has been pointed out to us that the angle of the photo sacrifices the skyward pose of the statue, which has a significant cultural meaning. In addition, the impressive physique of the sculpture is largely lost in this image, so while we love the dynamics of the angle, we are going to have to use another image.

At this point we have tentatively cropped the original image we found. We will be live tracing it to get a sense for the light and shadow, the mass distribution, and the basic shapes involved. Once we have those in place we will be able to begin simplifying towards Hammersveld's clean style.

So we have started vectoring the image. Laura is putting the background together, and I am working on the linework and fill for the warrior. However, when I started trying to colour and shade, I ran into some trouble. Dealing with the separate shapes of everything is turning out to be much more involved and difficult than I realized, so I have spent the past few days trying to figure out the program and looking for help.

I ended up finding this video tutorial, which has offered some methods I am going to be employing in class today. Basically, I have learned a bit about using Live Paint, Expand, and the knife tool. Hopefully this should make it easier to paint and shade our warrior!

Shading progress!!

After speaking with my professor today, I am going with a pen tool process rather than the knife, as the linework for this project was produced differently and responds differently to the knife. I shall try the video's method another day. 

Well, I've gone and finished the shading and highlighting! My partner put together the background and shaded the bow and arrow. Overall, I think we are pretty happy with this!