Two pieces of "modern art"

To me, a lot of what is labelled modern art is utterly without interest. I am annoyed by tagging and graffiti that serves no purpose but to seemingly try to make the world acknowledge that "I am here, hey, look at me!", abstract art sometimes makes me feel nauseous and I am seldom to never caught by pop-art, op-art and so on and so forth. The assignment, thus, to make two paintings in whatever two styles of modern art that I chose myself, was initially a source of some frustration. But creativity kicked in, and the results were fairly satisfactory. Not much more, but still. My nickname being Ellie, and me sometimes nodding in appreciation at the very best street artists and graffiti pictures (there are a few, I could probably count them on one hand), I thought I'd do something so artsy as to bring "ugly" art, street art, rebellion art, to the respected canvas. Therefore I spent an afternoon putting this idea into practice, and the result can be seen here. I tried my best to think of some of the features of a graffitied name - how do they use colours, what makes the name stand out yet being readable, and so on and so forth.I used Process Yellow, Process Cyan and Windsor Blue. Apart from this, only Titanium White and Process Black were used. The black was spiked with some Crimson, to make it stand out even more, and I added it very conscious of the effect it would have on the painting. The highlights were a tricky part, but the last spots of yellow a thing of improvisation that turned out well. So, it is not as garish and eye-catching as most graffiti, but rather, done the way I would do it. I am fairly happy with it.

The next picture is a digital photo manipulation. Because there is so much digital art these days, and, much of it really is true art in my opinion, I wanted to try and see, could I perhaps do something of the kind? Having no illusions of my skills with Photoshop, I began with a picture of me in costume from a larp - as Dream of the Fair Folk. There used to be a tree trunk in the background, which was when I learned to love the Clone tool (which clones one area onto another).I added the light magic effect thing, and then I used filters to make it look less like a photograph. It was a bit more work than that, but, that was the main process. It taught me a lot about photo manipulation, and some about what a vast array of tools are available for digital artists; also, some of what is required for expertise in the area. Regardless, I am fairly happy with the result, and it was well received by the teacher.