Self-Portrait

Today, we started the final assignment for the semester. In this exercise, we are suppose to render the darkest darks and lightest lights in order to create a portrait of ourselves. This value exercise requires us to erase the dark to get light unlike the other that required us to shade to get dark and light. Intially, I thought this process would be much easier only to find out that the nose I started to draw is too small. Among other things, I have to focus on seeing my face in terms of light instead of its iconic qualities.

DAY 1

“Feeding Time”

When I was first assigned this project, I wanted to make a butterfly. My ideas were to use wire to make the foundation and also cover the wire with tissue paper in order to highlight the light weight and the beautiful colors of butterflies. After much contemplation, I decide that making the wings was what I was most interesting in doing for this project. I thought, What other animals have wings that I would like to create? I decided to make a bird. This idea popped into my head because my class mascot is a phoenix. After researching bird images, I identified the major characteristics of a bird. Bird-like features that I wanted to show in my piece were the beak, wings, and color.

Red Wings

  The next day when I began working on the piece I did not have a clear idea of how I wanted to create my bird. I, eventually, started with the wire but soon realized that the wire was too thin. Zama suggested that I intertwine  the wire to make the structure sturdy. The rest of my project developed in the same manner; I use trial and error to figure out what worked best. I also began to create the other peices as I imagined the storyline. The peice that I put the most thought into was the beaks of the birds in the nest. I wanted to take the most important feature of the bird and use it to represent the babies in the nest. I wanted my viewers to see the beaks and imagine the rest of the baby birds. The worm was actually the last part that I added because I felt like something was missing from my story. When I added the worm, I felt my story “Feeding Time” was complete. My art had a beginning and an end.

The materials that I used were also a result of trial and error. I looked through the supplies to see what worked for my work. I know that I wanted a red bird because I wanted it to be the same color as my class mascot, the phoeni but everything else sorta followed while I was working. My explanation of what I wanted to created, how I wanted to create it, and what materials I wanted to use all seem slightly haphazard. With this peice, I was simpily going with what felt right. Each peice that I added was like creating the next sentence, paragraph, or Chapter in my narrative “Feeding time”.

“Art and the City”: From DC to NY Spring Break style

 

As I walked throughout the major cities of Washington DC and NewYork City during spring break, I noticed that the city was decorated with many different forms of art. From the railways to the college campus, people have presented their art in a way that depicts the respective cities. These pictures also caught my attention and in some way has a connection to me and my life. I show this relationship by naming the art the first word or phrase that pops into my head.

Creating Words

For this project, we were told to make a visual representation of a word. We were to use different shapes to engage the space on the page in a way that portrays the word that we picked. While doing this project, we were to consider many different things. For example, lines are arrows because they point your eyes in particular directions. Also, depending on where the line is postioned on the page deteremines the relationship the line has with the page. Other concepts to think about were scale, style, value, and the composition of the peice.

This project was very different from the value exercise and had to be completed much quicker than any of the other assignments. Despite the short period, I decided that I would do my best to complete the project. I was given the word TROUBLED. It took me forever to decide how I could represent this world. Even discussing my ideas with a classmate wasn’t very helpful. I felt like I was not very creativity was not shown while  doing this project. I may be being harsh on my work but this was my least favorite peice that I produced in this class.

In order to represent the word troubled, I wanted to show that there was a continuous pattern. The continuous pattern would represent the contancy that one battles with when they are troubled. The part of the peice that represents the  uneasiness that occurs when one is troubled is the black space. The black spaces in the pattern are there to show how being troubled disturbs the things that are constant in life.