The final assignment in the first semester of my art class was to take a master and re-create one of his pieces of art. I chose Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel for my inspiration. I chose this for two reasons: 1) because I love the artist's work (for me it is all about the emotion), and 2) I usually draw female figures and decided to do a male image for a change. I used the grid method for this piece and we could only use dry media such as colored pencils, pastels, etc. for the final project. It took about 4 weeks to finish and even at that I was close to not finishing when the final exam rolled around. My art teacher, Diane, would have a mini-exhibition for our final where we would present our piece and then give a report about the artist and the piece at the same time. Our families were invited to the exhibition and the food and drink (non-alcoholic) made the evening all the more enjoyable.

This piece was invited to be part of an exhibition at the Boehm Gallery at Palomar College. The piece is called "Camera Shy" and was done completely in white charcoal on Mi-Tientes paper. This piece was done using the grid method. We had to take a small picture and make it at least 25% larger.

I had been away from art for some time so I decided to start taking some art classes. I started out with Drawing & Composition which was a class that used only dry media. For this particular piece, we were supposed to take a color picture and convert it to black and white using black and white charcoal. It took about three weeks to do this project. This was a little outside my box since I prefer doing portraits and figure drawing. We did this drawing using a grid much like the old masters. It started out as a small picture which we were to increase by size.