AP Art Concentration 1 & 2

Piece 2

Piece 1

These are the first two pieces that I did for my AP Concentration. The Concentration has to be a series of pieces that are centered around one main idea. The main idea of mine is machine parts. I wanted to show a story of how a part starts out as a hunk of metal (like in the first picture). That piece of metal could then turn into hundreds of different types of parts. Every piece represents something that an unremarkable piece of metal can turn into. To put this in perspective, I took over a hundred reference pictures of different parts and machines. I only used ten.


Now that the description is out of the way, I'll talk about the pieces. Looking back on these, I notice a lot of flaws. I was still learning to use ink washes and watercolor pencils, and I was still trying to figure out how to get metal to have the reflectiveness of metal. At first, I expected flat areas of metal to be only one shade of gray. However, I quickly noticed that this made the metal look dull and flat and, well, not very metal-like. I looked closer at my reference pictures and started noticing subtle gradients across every flat surface. The metal would also reflect the color of anything that was near it. In the first piece I added in a yellow tint to the area below the yellow bucket and added gradients to the top of each round piece. I probably could have gone a little further because pieces on the right still look a bit flat.


In the second piece I also added colored reflective light to reflect the red surface that the coil was sitting on. This was the first piece where I used watercolor pencil for a large area of it. It's not bad, but it isn't great either. Every brush stroke is visible, especially in the black areas, and the color is not evenly spread out. These things are more obvious after seeing my more recent concentration pieces. I can't wait to share them because there is a lot of improvement from the first piece to the last!