Kenneth Kozan

Showing posts with label Traditional Art. Show all posts

Some time has passed since my last real entry. I have been working on smaller projects on the side and should have a post for my most recent environment up in a few weeks.

These are a few doodles I've done in the last months. Nothing too fancy, just little drawings of whatever came to mind.

This is the project I'm currently working on.

Antimage Weapon for Dota 2

Quick drawing for the 3D Motive competition

Doodles

So this is my Metal Arts portfolio from high school. When I attended Lakota East High School, for the last 2 years I was there I concentrated my art studies in jewelry design and creation.

During my senior year I put together this portfolio and submitted it into the Scholastics Art and Writing Awards. I was awarded a Gold Key Portfolio Award in the regional level of the show, and at the national level I was awarded a Silver Key Portfolio Award. For those who may not be familiar with the Scholastics Awards, it is one of if not the most prestigious art competition for high school art students.

I was part of the top 1% of all artists who submitted work throughout the country, and with my work being recognized at the national level I was invited to the award ceremony hosted at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

My work was also accepted into other art competitions such as the Ohio Governor's Art Exhibition and the Mason Arts Festival (a professional show).

Just to clarify, all the pieces are original designs. Also none of the components in any of the pieces were pre-fabricated, all the pieces were fully hand crafted from either sheet metal or metal wire.

Anyway, here are the pieces of my jewelry portfolio:

-Mana Shoot-
Riveted copper plates and tin detailing

-Empedocles-
Nickel silver with crush stone inlay

-Golden Path-
Cast white bronze on sterling silver band

-Oligocene Epoch-
Nickel silver and sopper wire detailing, deer antler handle

-Rothko Experiment-
Sterling silver and copper with crush stone inlay

-Scarlet Eye-
Nickel silver band with copper and silver wire detailing, and crush stone inlay

-Unnatural Protector-
Copper and brass plates

-Yamabushi's Gaze-
Nickel silver and cast white bronze with crush stone inlay

This next piece was done about 2 years after I had graduated. It has been a while since I had done any metal working and I was itching to create again. I returned to my high school during my off hours from school, where there I helped students with their own designs while working on my own pieces.

This necklace was far more challenging than my previous works. Each plate hangs separately from each other and when worn they adapt to the wearer since they are independent, while retaining their shape due to the way they are linked together. It is about 2 inches tall and 1 inch wide, the minute scale contributed to the difficulty in the execution process of the piece.

-Nexus Lines-
Cuddle fish cast sterling silver with copper and silver wire detailing, and a set stone

While metal working is very much different from any of my current digital projects, it is something I enjoy very much. And even still, I find many aspects where the work is still the same. The extreme organization and precision required, together with endless hours of polishing and perfecting make it seem like the mediums haven't changed at all.

Jewelry Design

So here are some other works I created during my traditional art classes.

This was my character maquette project. We had to design a character and draw out the standard turnaround, as it would be a "blueprint" for our sculpture.

I liked the idea of a viking dwarf so I decided to explore on it, and in the end came up with this design:

Once the character was figured out, we had to think about the posing of the character to make an interesting sculpture. One of the most important aspects of a sculpture is it's silhouette. These are some of the poses I had in mind:

With a final pose decided we proceeded to create the wire skeleton for the sculpey to build around. Since my character was quite chubby I used a bit of tinfoil to give his torso some mass. I also used it in the horns and feet.

After a few days of working, I smoothed the sculpture out and baked it. This is the how it turned out:

Minigimli stands proud and readies for battle.

This next project is technically 3D but it is composed of 2D elements. We were tasked to take an existing image with distinct foreground-middleground-background elements and break them down into planes.

One of my favorite games is Shadow of the Colossus, as I've always been awed by its incredible atmospheric immersion I thought it would be perfect to break apart a shot of a landscape. So I chose this picture:

Even though the landscape worked great, it was missing the game's biggest icon: a colossus. I added one in from another picture and proceeded to break down the planes. I have always felt that the game has a dreamlike state to it, so I figured that watercolor paints would be perfect for the assignment. After mapping each subdivision out, the final product turned out like this:

This last project was done prior to my studies at Full Sail. Back when I attended DAAP, we were tasked to design the cutest robot possible. The class would vote, break into groups and build the top 4 robots out of cardboard at a very large scale. The idea was to have these gigantic cute creatures be on display throughout the halls of the school.

My design, Wrenchy the Robot, was one of the chosen ones.

Over the course of 2 weeks we gathered enough cardboard from most furniture stores around the area and got to work. Wrenchy ended up being about 7 feet tall, and over 9 feet wide.