Originally posted by darkartminiatures
@ Deadite: I talked to all of my tutors at the start of the year
It sounds from this as if you have more than one tutor. Is this guy giving you your final grade on this project/your school life, or advising you before you go before an exam board or what? I\'m asking to try to gauge how much his opinion matters. If he\'s just advising you, see if you can get opinions from another tutor or two. If he\'s giving the grade, you need to consider ways to help him see how much effort has gone into your artwork.
As for evaluating my work, well I don’t think it takes much understanding on sculpting to realise that it takes effort, time and patience in order to create something like that. This is something he should understand.
Yes and no. The problem that your teacher may be having (aside from having issues with things of small size and possibly compensating for something else of small size ;->) is that you are working at a scale and with a medium completely unfamiliar to him. When he looks at another student\'s oil painting or clay sculpture or whatever, he\'s evaluating how much work went into it based on his own experience doing that kind of art with that kind of medium. He has no experience on which to draw in evaluating yours, and either because he\'s cynical about how much work students do or because he really does think big is better, he\'s assuming you\'ve done the absolute minimum possible.
The title of your project is great, since I\'m sure there is a lot of impact in size reduction, both in terms of how the artist works, and is how the audience perceives the work. It sounds like what you need to do is as much as possible to really demonstrate the challenges of working at that scale and with that medium.
It sounds like you\'ve got another month or so before everything\'s final? If getting a positive opinion from this person is very important, you could try doing one last piece working in the studio where he can see you. And if possible try to have him specifically observe the unique properties of GS, how you have to work in stages and cure it, how hard it is to smooth down, etc. If you can\'t have him observe, maybe it would help to do a final sculpture and keep all the in-progress stages. What I mean is really do like 5 finals, keeping one at the armature stage, one at the \'muscles\' stage and so on, so he can see there\'s some work from point A to point B. Although it really does sound like you\'ve already got a lot of sketches and WIP stuff to support your work, so this might already be covered.
You could look for info on the art minatures painting (I mean as small paintings not as painting of figures) that support your \'impact of reduction\' thesis. You could try talking to other minature artists and see if you can get comments from them you can include in a small essay or something. I don\'t know how easy it is to get a hold of those people. I know Meier does non fantasy stuff, though it\'s typically for gift stores and whatnot, and may not be viewed as art. But since I think he\'s considered the innovator of working in GS and may be more appoachable than some of the \'arty\' miniaturists you mentioned, it might be worth a try. One of Steve Buddle\'s figures is based on a model in a figure drawing class he took, so it might be worth talking to him also? (That particular figure is stylized, but doesn\'t really look fantasy or sci-fi, so shouldn\'t harm your cause on that scale.)
Personally i feel that they look more pleasing if they were left green. I have seen enough white primed minsi to know what they would look like and i feel they would just lose some of the qualities that GS has that I like. Thanks for your input
This one I can kind of see his point. As an \'artist\', he\'s used to considering colour as part of the presentation, and bright green isn\'t a colour he\'d usually consider. I can remember how weird the first green I saw looked to me. And it\'s weird enough if it\'s uniform, if it\'s mixed colours because the artist was doing different mixes for different areas, that looks very patchy. GS also has a distinct shine to it, and as we are always bitching at painters in the gallery, shine makes it hard to see the details. ;-> I dunno if painting it white is a good answer if the whole display area is white, but I would consider the idea of painting them for the display if how the display is perceived is part of the grading process. I think there are strippers that don\'t harm GS, so you can just paint them for the display and them strip them to match your own tastes after?
@Medved: My tutors comments was that he would “like to see 200 of these little things” So theres not much chance of me doing that in a month
Yeah, it sounds like your best hope is trying to open his eyes as to the work involved in what you\'ve done more than trying to add much more, since even if he\'s doubling his figure for exaggeration that\'s the impossible dream.
It sounds as if you\'ve learned a lot at school, even if the people who are teaching you haven\'t, so at least that\'s something. And I for one would love to see pictures of your stuff!
Oh, and I don\'t know if it would help your tutor see the world of the small or just give him unrealistic expectations, but here\'s a very
miniature artist.