Venus and Mars

I really like this painting because of the meaning for it, it means love conquers all. Even Mars, God of War stopped fighting for sometime because he fell in love with Venus.

The Birth of Venus

This painting is also another one of my favorites. I like this one because I think it's creative the way she is created. She was born from the ocean and Botticelli painted her standing on a sea shell.

Primavera

This is one of my favorite paintings by Botticelli. I like this painting because it has to do with Greek mythology and overall it's is very magical. It has Venus in the middle preparing for the beginning of spring. The three Graces on the left, and on the far left is Hermes, God of messengers. Hermes is protecting the grove from intruders. On the right is Flora tossing flower petals on the ground, and next to Flora is Chloris, who later transforms into Flora. On the far right is Zephyrus, God of the Wind. He his in love with Chloris. And above Venus is her son Cupid, shooting his arrows.

Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli, was born on March 1st, 1445 in Florence. He was an Italian painter in the early Renaissance. At the age of 15 he decided to open up his own shop to sell his paintings and take requests for paintings. He mostly did paintings of characters from Greek mythology. Botticelli was most famous for his painting Primavera. Which was a painting of Venus, Goddess of Love in a orange grove. It represented the beginning of spring. During the time of the Renaissance was when his paintings were most popular, but later his paintings were less desirable. After he died, many years later his paintings were yet again more popular.

I really enjoy Botticelli's work because I had always liked Greek mythology and the stories behind them. The myths had many messages in them. So when I saw that Botticelli did paintings of the Greek Gods, I knew I wanted to my project about him.

The three paintings that appealed to me the most were Primavera, Venus and Mars, as well as The Birth of Venus.

First Marking Period

When I came back to art class this year I felt like this is going to be a whole new experience, and it was. First we made some pages for our future book that is bigger than it was last year! I knew when I made pages that they would be different compared to what I did last year. Then we did our shoe drawings which I think I did better than I expected. With our collages mine turned out pretty good, it was defiantly better then what I did last year. Overall I did very well, I have gotten better over the year and since I first came in this year. You can only get better!

Next President Collage

This year we had to make a collage about the next president. Either Romney, Obama, or even just select a topic like environment, war, healthcare, ect. I chose gay rights for my topic. I believe that they should have rights, everyone was created equal weren't they? Underneath everything is scenery. At the top is the calm before the storm, the second one is when is everyone is arguing about whether or not they should have rights, and the last one represents that in the end they do get rights. That yellow line going all the way down the page means that there's always that ray of hope. The tissue paper on top creates mystery in the piece. You can faintly see what the future holds.

Shoe Drawing

This year we are drawing shoes! We brought in our shoes and put them in a pile on top of one another. We used our view finders to see a section of the shoes we found the most interesting. We then began to draw them on a fairly large piece of paper. Once that was done we had to shade them in or color them in with colored pencils if we so choose. I was afraid to shade mine in because this was my first time actually shading. But it turned out better than I had imagined! This was defiantly a good experience for me. Now all I do is shade things in.