Loyola Light Show

The light show Loyola put on was spectacular. All around the McManus and Humanities area, Loyola's campus was lit with a myriad of beautiful colors. These lights ranged from a whole lot of things, but the two pieces of art that caught my eye most were the big lit up Loyola L and the colored lights on the windows of Sellinger. I have included photos below. The L changed colors every few seconds and it was really cool to see how bright it really was. This is a cool form of modern art with the bright color scheme and using all of the colors on the main color wheel.

Also, the windows on the side of Sellinger that you can see if you are walking to the College Center from the other side of the bridge, were lit up all rainbow. You can see the lights from so far away which I thought was really cool. Like the L, these windows had all of the colors on the wheel, except instead of changing, they always stayed the same colors. All in all, I thought the light show was cool and I can't wait to go again next year!

The Six Diegos

I have been studying the Swiss artist, Alberto Giacometti, throughout the semester and did my final project on him. Giacometti was a surrealist and existentialist who was known for his skinny sculptures and his simple drawings. I chose to use his drawing style for my final project. In 1958, Giacometti drew his “Portrait de Diego”. Giacometti used a black crayon for this portrait and it honestly looks like he just drew a bunch of lines to create Diego.

I based my project off of this portrait, but instead of one, I made six Diegos. For each and every portrait I drew, I used a different writing utensil. The top row (from left to right) was drawn by a colored pencil, an ebony pencil, and a colored marker. The bottom row (from left to right) was drawn by a thin sharpie marker, a crayon and a normal pencil. This gave each portrait a different feeling due to the diverse textures the different tools were able to create.

Giacometti only used black during his portraits, but I wanted to modernize it up a little bit by adding slight color. I didn’t want to go over the top by adding every color on the color wheel, so I stuck with only blue and alternated between blue and black/gray portraits. Creating almost like a “checkerboard” feel, the blue definitely spices up the project a little bit making it more enjoyable to view. This is a monochromatic color scheme because blue is the only color used, with black/gray complementing it.

The focal point of my project is supposed to be the portrait in the top middle (the ebony pencil one). I think this because it is the best looking portrait out of the six in my opinion, so I decided to put that in the top middle so everyone’s eyes can look at it first and then look around at the rest of the portraits. Each portrait also takes up about two thirds of the space on each canvas. It was important to make it more than half to show that the main part of the drawing is Diego, not the white space behind him. Although not obviously not 100% perfect, each portrait is symmetrical, so if you were to cut it in half across the middle, each side should look exactly like its counterpart. The value of the piece is generally dark, as there are no bright, fun colors popping out at year. The project keeps to only black and blue.

This was my favorite class out of the five that I took the entire semester. I have only taken one art class since middle school, so I really did not know what to expect going into this. I learned about so many different two dimensional design techniques and even got to learn about an artist all semester. My favorite part was the satisfaction you felt when you completed a project; just being able to look at your completed product and be proud that it is your’s.

If I had to change one thing about the class or something that I did not like to much, it would be that there was not enough time for the projects. I felt like I would stay up late Monday night doing a project due Tuesday, just to get a new project due for my next class Thursday after I handed in my Tuesday project. It obviously is not as taxing as, say, studying for accounting for that much time every week, but there was definitely a lot of out of class time put into all of the projects. Overall, it was a great class and the art skills I learned will definitely help me in the business world to make me become a great marketer.