Category: Student Posts

In my opinion, this was definitely one of the harder side quests so far. I found the last one easier because we had access to whatever objects/pictures we wanted, since images on the internet are essentially unlimited. This time we were limited to our own personal inventory. I don’t know if I’m not creative or if I just don’t own many miscellaneous items, but the conception of my idea for the combination took a while. Finally, while listening to music, I was staring at my AirPods case and realized they looked a lot like a character from one of my favorite movies: Eve from WALL-E. It accurately represented the color and shape (no hard edges) of Eve’s body, so I realized it was the perfect idea. The sketch was also relatively easy since Eve doesn’t have the most complicated body structure. For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, this is Eve from WALL-E.

I wanted to create a photo using the spiky balls that I grew up seeing fall from the trees. I thought it would be ironic to make the spiky balls into balloons because they are the complete opposite texture and color of a balloon.

For my Sunday Sketch I combined a pair of scissors and a drawing to make the head of a bird. I came up with the idea upon noticing that my scissors resembled a bird beak when I opened and closed them. I then promptly decided that this would be my 3D tangible object (I think I must have a fondness for creating things from scissors because this is the 2nd time in a row that I’ve used them in my creation). I laid the scissors down on a piece of paper and played around with the opening of the “beak”, eventually deciding to have it slightly ajar. Then, I traced the rest of the beak and the head of the bird with a pencil, and, once I was satisfied, traced the drawing with black and red permanent marker, which matched the color of the scissors. Once I had the idea, the process was pretty simple (even though I am clearly not an artist). The one difficult part was lining the middle dot on the scissors to where the bird’s eye should be. I think it ended up being a little bit too close to the beak, but all in all I’m pretty happy with the end result.

When I was deciding what to include in my Sunday sketch, nothing came to mind at first. I looked in my backpack to see if there were any interesting items I could incorporate into my sketch. I looked at Christoph Niemann’s sketches and saw that he used an earbud in one of them. With this inspiration, I decided to incorporate my Airpods into my sketch but using a different image. I thought of some different images I could create using my Airpods, and a bear came to mind. I looked up photos of bears and ultimately decided to draw a panda bear because of the contrast with colors: grizzly bears have many brown colors but panda bears are black and white. My white headphones would fit perfectly with a panda bear, so I decided to use them as the eyes. I looked up images of panda bears and gathered inspiration from them to use in my drawing. Below is my drawing of “Pandapods.” I hope you like it and find it cute!

I started this Sunday sketch project by looking through objects in my room for inspirations. At first, I wanted to use my tea mug as a bee’s body and wing, but the color was too brown to resemble a bee, and I turned to my drawer. Stapler was my second and final inspiration for this, its blue color instantly reminds me of the ocean and the shape of a dolphin’s rostrum. Then I looked up photos online that fits the angle I wanted and get my color pencils ready. The project officially began production.

I outlined the dolphin and colored different shades to make it look more vibrant than the actual photo, due to the difficulty in creating a realistic dolphin eye, I used human eye drawing technique to make things more humanized. Different color transitions makes it look more lively and smooth. I especially put darker shades on shaded area to make the sketch as much 3 dimensional as I can. This final project turns out better than I expected. With some photo editing, the stapler dolphin is shown above. I picked the name “trick or treat?” to emphasize the more dangerous dolphin rostrum, and want people to start caring and fearing these dolphins. The dolphins and any other animal deserve their own survival right and they need to have the power to leverage the decisions made my humans.

After scanning my room for interesting trinkets I found a rubber frog my friend got me from Morocco, a country famous for its rubber frogs. I initially drew a lilypad but the picture was boring and too simple. Staying true to the theme of the class, I’ve drawn a snapshot from the game Frogger. A classic game I last played when I was 8 and considered to be impossible to win. I revisited the game today and can only look back at my 8 year old self with shame for failing to win Frogger because it turns out to be quite easy.

By Rachel Vellanikaran

This week’s Sidequest assignment was one of my favorites so far. I loved looking through Christoph Niemann’s illustrations, and seeing the clever ways he incorporated random objects, like a banana or paperclip, into his drawings. As for my drawing, I’ve always thought lemon and orange slices vaguely resemble car or bicycle tires, so I chose to use this as inspiration for my “Sunday Sketch” idea. I’m no artist, so I only drew the basic aspects — peddle, handlebar, seat, etc. — of a bicycle around two thin lemon slices. Originally I was going to use an orange slice, but I wanted to make the pun…even though it’s not very funny and probably doesn’t make much sense lol.

I guess there is no deep meaning behind my sketch: I was practicing the bass in the jazz studio as usual, and I was complaining silently that the drum set takes up so much space, and then I thought about this side quest. Of course musicians thinks about everything else except the music when they have to practice pieces they do not like. (I do think of my music with full attention when I like them) The shape of bass drum looks like something I could find on my desk, and so that’s how I came up with the idea. It turned out that my face lotion matches perfectly as the central bass drum. It’s also interesting, as I realized later, that I drew it on the back of my sheet music, and I hope my music professors don’t see it, it’s too good to be erased.

First of all, allow me to thank Cherie silently for 20 seconds. She generously gave me this correction tape at the beginning of the semester last year, and I treasured every inch of it—so here it is, old, but not obsolete. It happened to be right next to me when I was planning to draw my Sunday sketch, and as it always reminded me of a bird of some kind, I sketched a bird. A sparrow, more precisely, since that is the most common bird around. Due to my limited sketching ability, this bird looks somehow transcendent. I sincerely hope birds as such will not be flying around in the future. Else it’ll be a bit creepy.

Here’s GROUSE. Grouse was not at all easy to create coming from someone who did not know how to draw anything besides a rose and flower. But hey, it’s not too bad is it? So obviously in this photo, i combined a picture of a house with some grass, hence the name Grouse. I actually liked this combophoto less than I liked my previous one, although this time I actually followed the rules of combining two photos rather than superimposing them.

The hardest part about this assignment was thinking of things that I can actually draw being that I am no artist. I could count on my hand about 5 things I can draw and a house being one of the more cohesive ones. Once I got my house drawing underway, it was easy finding what can actually combine with it. To be honest, I am pretty content with my picture and I may not be the best at drawing, but hey… we have GROUSE now!