Introduction – Nathan Reed

Posted by Nathan on

About Me:

Hello everyone, I am Nathan, a senior here at WPI studying Mechanical Engineering. I am from a town about one hour southeast from here called Lakeville. For me art is mainly a hobby that I enjoy which helps me relax and relieve stress. I mostly like to doodle with pen because I can do it at any time and it requires very little materials. In terms of future goals, I hope to apply the principles that I have learned through art to engineering projects I work on in the future so that they are not only functional but also astatically pleasing.

My experience with art other than personal projects comes primarily from classes here at WPI. I have mostly focused on digital art for my classes here with one class using a physical medium. My digital experience with art revolves around two programs, photoshop and FL Studio. My traditional art making experience is mainly using pastel pencils or simply pen on paper.

My Works:

Krieg Model

This piece was created using FL studio and then put into another software to create the rotation animation. The character in the model is based on a character named Krieg from a video game called “Borderlands”. This is one of my proudest creations and it represents a term worth of 3D modeling experience.

Sounds of Man

These two pieces are meant to depict the sounds of man with two different mediums. On the left is a scene created using pastel pencils. It depicts someone playing drums over a city. There are colored trails coming off of the drum sticks and coming out of the city. These trails represent the colorful and diverse sounds of man. The piece on the right was made using an online tool which converts sound into images. Each bar represents a different sound, from the sounds of New York city to the sound of someone playing drums. After creating the images for each sound they were all put into a collage using photoshop.

Sunset Painting

This piece was one of my personal projects. I made it using spray paint in an abandoned fort. It depicts a sunset over the ocean. It is a really simple piece but it was fun to make and I really liked how it came out when I was finished.

Other Digital Pieces

Here are three digital pieces I created using photoshop. The first on the left was a simple exercise to shade a ball. The second two pieces take characters from paintings and place them in photos from around campus.

Other Traditional Pieces

These two pieces were created using pastel pencils. The piece on the left is a cup and the piece on the right is a pillow case draped over something. These two pieces were drawn from a physical reference and are meant to be realistically depicted.

IQP Front End

These are screenshots of the front end of a database that my team and I created for our IQP project. It is designed to store images and data on old church records to prevent total loss in case of an emergency. It is also able to search through these records using key words and information from the documents. It is a very simple front end as we were heavily focused on making the functional components work properly. While it is simplistic, I am proud of what my group and I were able to create and I believe that the final product is easy to use and nice to look at.

6 Comments Add yours

  1. Sameer says:
    March 21, 2022 at 7:32 pm

    Hi Nathan, I will give you the thought-provoking badge. I really like your Sounds of Man pastel pencil piece. I really think you could have a whole story to go with it and it painted a vivid image in my mind. I like the contrast between grayscale and color.

  2. H says:
    March 21, 2022 at 9:21 pm

    hi nathan! i’m giving you the clever badge because of the interesting ways you incorporate different types of media together in your campus painting photoshop and waveform piece, and for how you brought the existing artscape together with your sunset painting. also, the shading on your 3d model defines the muscles and wrinkles in the fabric in a very borderlands way, it looks great!

  3. Kobayashi Kotori says:
    March 22, 2022 at 12:17 pm

    I am giving you the impressive badge. The model you made really impressed me.

  4. Julian says:
    March 22, 2022 at 11:50 pm

    I’m giving you the “gorgeous” badge. I love your sunset piece. Spray painting is a really fun medium.

  5. Ty says:
    March 23, 2022 at 12:19 pm

    CLEVER: I really liked your Sounds of Man pieces, especially the drawing of the city. I found your concept to be very clever and I love the way the different colors are streaming from the city into the sky. The audio images are also very colorful.

  6. Kaamil says:
    March 23, 2022 at 5:51 pm

    THOUGHT-PROVOKING: Loving the music driven pieces. The connection between audio and visual always makes me think. And the style of the sunset paintings – I would hang that up in my room if it wasn’t on a fort.

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