Art Project

The main part of the classroom was rows of connected tables, workspaces for the students, where they could all face the front of the room, but also had plenty of room for oversized sheets of thick paper. I just walked through this room, looking at the students and easels and air brushes, They were all working on their major projects. I was headed to the cage.

The cage was this large storage room off of the art class room, the door to it was pretty much always open throughout the day. When you first looked into this room, it was just a dark grey pattern. This was caused by the thick grey fence which ran the length of this ten foot deep closet. Once you are in the room, you can see the other side of the fence is a giant collection of art supplies. Paper and Berol colored pencils. Paint and clay. Brushes of dozens of sizes and strange odds and in, probably for still life displays. At first, you couldn't even see what I was here for.

With the key Mr Sanders gave me as soon as I walked through the door, I unlocked the cage. I pull it open, step into the storage area and make my way to the computer. This was the one art computer in the school and I had been lucky enough to have time on it pretty much everyday. At that time, I don't think there was a lot of competition for it.

I pressed the power switch and let the Macintosh power up. I have decided to do my art project using three dimension rendering, smoking I could probably do with a free app today, but in the day was fairly cutting edge for a amateur user. It is numbers and trial and error and finding the right position to print from. I try spheres and squares, but the simple shading makes them kind of boring. They are too simple.

I start messing around user defines polygons, shapes I can define myself, and I create a stylized ring. I adjust the lighting and at some point it just pops. I then click 'print' and wait. From here I begin printing shots of this ring, adding rings, once I figure out how to make them over lap precisely, then a make a sphere out of three of these rings. By the time I was done, I have a bunch of these interesting pictures, but this is not a project.

I consider what I can do. I talk to Julius, my youth leader, who is a professional commercial artist, he tells me to come out to the studio someday after school and he'll help me. This is awesome. I'm going to get to work on my project in a professional studio, with a professional artist. I have no idea what to expect, but I was excited anyway.

Julius looks at the various prints of my rings, he looks at them and tells me they are cool, but I am not sure he is just seeing what is there. I imagine he's looking at places he could blow up to enormous size, or placing colors over them or xeroxing them over and over again until they loose definition. Together, we through out ideas and them play with them. Colored acetate, nah. Layering them, that doesn't quite work. Photograph them and print them onto transparencies so we could play with the background.

Then he spots the negative, which was not at all like the negatives I was used to seeing. It was this dark purple and grey, thick paler with my rings impressed onto them. They had this quality which was hard to see from one angle and standing out at another. This was it. We took a set of four evolving rings and mounted them onto a long black panel, covering the negative with clear plastic. It was cool.

Mr. Sanders loved it. He asked how it was done, all the details. When I told him I had used CAD to design the rings and designing my own shape and what I needed to do with the lighting, he smiled. He told me a local company, On-line Graphics, was looking for a student who knew a little about computer art to help them. If I wanted, he would tell them to give me a call.

An A and a job. Life was good.