Visual Art
2019 - 2025
I've always been a visual person, and sketching and painting have been core parts of my artistic identity since I was in high school.
This is a gallery of the various paintings I have completed for school activities and personal projects since my senior year of high school.
All of the paintings are in watercolor or acrylic.
This was my final for THR 330 Drawing and Rendering. The assignment was to pick a professional costume rendering and recreate it. I have been obsessed with this dress ever since then. The mottled textures were a really interesting challenge. the top right rendering was a color test I did before the final version to get a sense of how to get the colors to lay over and blend with each other.
Final piece for AVT 222 Drawing 2. A piece of advice I recieved in that class that I've been trying to carry through to my current work is to focus on caputuring the artistic essence of what you want to draw, rather than the technical details. I still appreciate this piece for reminding me to find ways to use the texture that the medium naturally lends itself to create detail.
(The signature is disguised as a piece of similar graffiti that is actually on that concrete bench, I didn't just stick it in the middle of the block)
Also completed for THR 330. In my infinite wisdom, I neglected to write down the name of the ballet that this back drop was originally from, and the name of the book I found it in. I wanted to try and make my replica a 1:1 scale version of the reference I printed out, but I definitely should have made it larger. I started getting pretty cramped and claustrophobic trying to fit the detail of something meant to span a stage onto a 9"x11" sheet of paper.
This poster was one of four - War Bonds, War Gardens, Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam Wants You. The center marimba was dressed up as a newspaper that's headlines would progress as the suite of music progressed. The show itself was supposed to be about specifically America's involvement in WWII, which was ambitiously nuanced theme for a high school marching band, to say the least.
The top edge of the newspapers were attatched to poles that rested on a sort of rack that we jury rigged out of hooks meant for holding garage tools. They were all attached at the bottom to the bottom frame of the marimba. During each act, my playing partner and I would flip each 'page' down to reveal the next headline. I used canvas drop cloths and sketched out the layout in ball point pen, and then painted on the text with black acrylic paint.
It feels sort of cliche to say that this "came to me in a dream", but it really did. I sketched it in my biology notebook when I woke up and recreated it when I found a watch with a broken glass, allowing me to paint directly on the face of the clock. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to seal the paint, and it got scratched off during a move.
I remember doing this for a friend in the afternoon before their birthday celebration. Cranberry Sprite was something of an inside joke in the band department for awhile.
This was painted for a friend at the beginning of quarantine. I wanted to convey the disillusionment and destabilization that I felt during that time. My goal was to balance the eerie serenity of being stuck at home with the total collapse of what I once knew
I was a member of the front ensemble and to convey the theme of our show, I proposed remaking war posters from the period. Without the budget to get them screen printed, I took it upon myself to paint them.
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Phone: 571-284-8066
Instagram: @electronclouds
Email: nguyen.eli@outlook.com