When I first read the topic for today, I automatically assumed it meant a piece you did yourself, so that's where I'm going.
Being a graphic artist with a background in layout and design with a Bachelor's Degree in Art I have quite a bit of pieces to show off, which can be easily view by clicking the "My Art" tab under my blog banner up above here.
I can't really pick just 1 piece, so I post and share some of my favorites I've done.
This first one is a master artist study that we did in my Painting I class in college. The project was to find a well-known artist and select a piece of theirs to do a study on and then replicate it using the same means and techniques that the artist did. I built the frame to the correct dimensions thanks to the woodshop in the art building (which I HATED by the way as I always somehow got covered in sawdust, lol), built my canvas and began working away. The artist I chose was Max Ernst and this piece is called "Sea and Sun." I love surrealist works as they're a bit strange and out there and a lot of Ernst's work is surrealist. For a beginning painting class, I think it turned out pretty well and this one is proudly displayed in our living room. Mine is on the left, the original is on the right.
The photo for this next piece doesn't quite do it justice. This was a project for my Painting II class I took in college. The project was 2 combine elements of 2 different artists to create a work of our own. Jackson Pollock is a favorite artist of mine as love his paint drip technique that he uses and I've always wanted to do a Pollock-like piece myself and used this as my opportunity. I forget who the other artist I crossed Pollock's style with for this project, but I remember it was a woman and she used fabric in all her paintings. I thought it was interesting but I wasn't that crazy about it so once I took the piece home, I pulled off most of the fabric flowers I had originally put on it. This frame was built with stretcher bars, I built the canvas and used 3 smaller buckets of paint from the paint store in black, lilac and turquoise. It's a bigger piece and I'm quite happy with it now that it doesn't have most of the fabric flowers on it - it's currently hanging over the loveseat couch that's in our bedroom.
This next piece I did near the end of my Intro to Watercolor class and it was probably one of the better pieces I did for that class as I royally sucked at watercolor. As you can tell, it's Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants with his rock house in the background as well as Gary the Snail. I say it's probably one of my better watercolors as this was one of the few pieces I did for that class where I actually felt like I "got it" - unfortunately though, this was near the end of the semester. I hope that Jay will like Spongebob and perhaps we can hang mommy's watercolor in his room or somewhere.
This is another watercolor I did for Intro to Watercolor and it was one I did in the middle of the semester. I was quite into anime during college (thanks mostly to my ex), and I decided to incorporate the black kitty from Trigun into a piece. In it, he's rolled over, playing dead, trying to avoid all the bullets (the black dots in the painting) from a shoot out that's going on (as there's plenty of those in Trigun). Like the Patrick one above, this was one of my better watercolors I did in that class (I really didn't like watercolor!).
This one is from my 3D Art class I took my 2nd semester in the art program at my college. Our instructor had us watch this creepy Russian claymation Alice in Wonderland video (which I found out later belonged to my best friend at the theater) and then explained that our project was to show a pair of hands interacting with each other and we had to include x-amount of wire and x-amount of plaster as our mediums. Playing off the creepy Alice video, I decided to be a bit abstract and show 2 hands "building" each other. It was interesting project and I'll admit, I enjoyed playing with the plaster.
This last one is a project I did for my Intro to Printmaking class I took my last semester of college. In the class, we had to do several different type of etchings, where we used different mediums to create an etching onto a sheet metal plate and then we had to print it onto our paper. A lot of my projects in this class were hit and miss, as it was a learning process and we only had x-amount of time for each type of printmaking we were doing at the time. This Hard Ground etching was one of my better etchings out of the set we did (I believe we did 3 or 4 different types of etching). It's a hand picking up a heart on a chain.
. Summer is an Olympic gold medal swimmer and in addition to her hosting duties in the late 90s/early 2000s on Nickelodeon's Figure It Out game show, she also does specials and such on ESPN and was a contestant on Trump's Celebrity Apprentice 3 that aired this past Spring. In the DVD, there's 3 different workouts - one for each trimester you're in - and Summer is 7 months pregnant in it so it helps to see a fellow pregnant lady doing the exercises and being able to watch how she gets into these different positions so you don't hurt yourself. Each trimester workout has 2 versions - a full length one that lasts about 50 minutes or a shorter "express" version. I tried the full length version yesterday since I had the time and wow! What a workout! I felt pretty good afterwards too!
"
, 
- I'm sure there's one for the new homeowner's soul too!). I got hooked on the Teenage Soul ones when I was in Junior High and just kept up with them. The stories that are submitted are funny, cute, and heart-warming as well as helpful too. And they make for great bathroom reading too as the stories are usually 2-5 pages long and sometimes include little poems, quotes/verses/mantras and amusing cartoon comics throughout. While this one says it's for Expectant Moms, there's an entire section devoted to expectant daddies too! What's neat is that the stories are all submitted/written by real people who share their experiences with the topic and sometimes celebrities will submit some too, so it's kinda neat to be able to relate to some of them (the teen ones always had several celeb submitted stories in each of them which was pretty cool).