As an artist, I’m always struggling to find inspiration to create, and when I do find inspiration I always want to do these 40 day project that are entirely unthinkable given my time and resources. We live in a time and a space where we literally can’t slow down, life moves at a million miles per hour, with no rest stops, no time to morn lost time, no time to contemplate what’s coming up next on the road and no end in sight. This particular project was an opportunity to produce alot of small piece very quickly, but I wanted to just slow down and really focus on the point of this assignment: what can you create with just a few lines a couple dots and a single curve. The answer that came to me is the essence of humanity. I created a piece that reflected who I am as a person, stripped bare of all of things that make me an “individual”. In this piece I experienced detachment and truly began to understand the teachings of the Buddha. For the first time I understood that their is no self, at the end of the day we’re all just people, but even our flesh and bones are an illusion, we are energy floating in the façade of reality vibrating insentiently, suffering immensely, the only solution is cessation and yet we beg for only more movement, because life is movement life is tumbling down the hill of mortality and hitting every rock, and we’ve convinced ourselves that this is what we want, that this is what we need. This week I was happy to take a break, and truly see myself for who I am.

I was mostly kidding about the above post but I was serious about wanting to get to the root of the assignment, and I think that was telling a story with an image. The image is blank but most people would recognize it as a person and I think each person would come to a different conclusion as to the meaning of the piece if not for the paragraph above. They create their own story. Their Is a story behind this piece, and I added some things which I think serve as clues, but I don’t want to discuss it just yet, instead, to whomever may be reading this, please comment with what you think the true meaning of this piece is. Thank you for reading.

Here is a picture of a Dog I drew. Im no artist but I was pretty pleased with how this turned out

The final Visual Assignment I’ve chosen to do for this week is for 3 and a half stars, and it can be found here. It was to create digital art using only 4 Lines, 5 Dots,  and 1 Curve.

This was a very fun piece to make! To be honest, I don’t really have much experience in making art, or digital art, in the first place. The last time I used paint must have been in my childhood. I used to really enjoy using it to make nonsense pictures, as you do when you’re a kid and paint is the most exciting thing you could possibly find on a computer. I chose to draw a bird here since I figured it would fit well with the simple shapes given, and I do love birds. Often, I like to sit with my parents and watch the birds at our bird feeder out front. Like suggested in the assignment, I tried to play around with the sizes of the dots and lines, as well as some of the textures, like on the bird’s feathers and on the curve that represents the tree branch. I think, with my level or artistry in consideration, that it didn’t turn out so bad! At least, my childhood self would’ve enjoyed this creation.

There’s little tutorial I can provide for this assignment, except to have at it using paint or your other favorite digital drawing tool! This is a fun assignment to do when you start messing with the colors and textures of your dots and lines, and you have to really think about using your resources wisely. I do enjoy this sort of minimal art!

I also posted this creation to Instagram, but the resolution didn’t turn out as well there.

View this post on Instagram

Minimalist art #ds106 #VisualAssignments #VisualAssignments988 #minimalistart #art

A post shared by Jessica (@jessicads106) on Sep 21, 2018 at 2:41pm PDT

???½

For my last assignment this week, I decided to do the assignment where you make something using only 4 lines, 5 dots, and 1 curve. I still had to do one assignment relating to the internet, so this is going to be that one. I ended up making this:

Inside the bubble made of the curve and line, people are connected by the internet. However, anyone without the ability to connect is left out. The people outside the bubble have trouble connecting to those inside the bubble, and vice versa.

Tools used:

• Inkscape

Another assignment I chose was worth 3.5 stars and was called 4 lines, 5 dots, 1 curve: where I had to draw a picture using 4 lines, 5 dots, and 1 curve.

First, I sketched a few ideas in my planner before drawing it on my computer.

Once I was sure that I followed the directions, I had to find somewhere to paint online because my computer does not have a paint program on it. I googled “paint online” and found a website called Paint Online, where I created my masterpiece:

I call it Me in the Summertime. Because there is sunshine and I am smiling.

I think the hardest part of this assignment was thinking of something to draw that matched the instructions. The rest was pretty easy, even if my picture isn’t that great!