Eleanor Seelaus

  “A picture frame sets off a work of art from its surroundings, bringing attention to the work and lifting it apart from its setting.” I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t able to finish the main artwork I was working on this week. It did have some interesting framing that was going to be even more emphasized in the final product, but alas, the sketch was fighting me.  The art that I did do this week was more geared towards color palette challenges, in which the artist has a specific, limited number of colors in order to make a piece, usually a simple drawing of a character (though I do want to do it with larger pieces at some point). While framing didn’t exist as purposefully in this setting, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t at play at all. For one, these aren’t full-page pieces, they are contained within the page, and this fact does mean that they have a sort of margin around them, though not in the traditional sense. Because they are not rectangular images, they don’t have...

 "Nostalgia looks toward what once was, not toward what could be. It promotes calm over change and solid stillness over fluid movement." While nostalgia wasn't necessarily at the forefront of my mind while creating art this week, it definitely played a role. We have a field of wildflowers on a sunny day, captured in one happy, peaceful moment. I do think there is a sense of nostalgia to the image itself, regardless of the fact that it never actually took place.    The field is open and calm, the day bright and sunny. Really, it is an ideal place to exist, even if only for a short time. And even if the image itself is fictional, there was also an element of nostalgia in its creation. It evoked a time from my childhood, trekking through a mountain field with my grandmother to document and identify various wildflowers. I even had a notebook that we’d gotten specifically for the purpose, complete with pictures of the flowers that we’d found, compared to a field book for ident...

  "Whether setting type or depicting a tree, the designer uses texture to establish a mood, reinforce a point of view, or convey a sense of physical presence."  Texture is something that I’ve begun to explore a bit more recently in my digital art. Usually, my goal in doing so is to emulate traditional art mediums, be that of graphite, watercolor, or acrylic. While this effect can be achieved in part using specific brushes, there are usually other steps involved. While rendering these eyes, I took extra time at the end to go in with a texturing brush and add some texture and interest that way. In the past, I’ve overlaid an image to give the canvas a paper or canvas texture, as if I had been working with that base the entire time. In these ways, I’m able to invoke more traditional artwork and add interest to my pieces.

Hello! I guess the main things that you need to know about me are that my name is Eleanor and I enjoy making art. But that's not very interesting, is it? Let's see, I'm also a student at Lawrence University and I'm planning to major in religious studies. I love mythology and music and creating new things, and it would be really cool if I could study architecture in graduate school. I suppose I’m using this blog to try to focus on improving my art and document that improvement. I’ve never really done so before, since most of the time I’m doing art on the side and for fun and such. But I would like to try and improve certain aspects of my work and my process and that won’t happen quickly without a concentrated effort from me. And so, this blog. I’m planning to have a focus each week about what I want to improve, and work on it through a series of sketches or more polished pieces. At the end of the term, I’m planning to redraw an artwork I made at the beginning as a way to...