The Digital Self Portrait Numero Uno

  In every course I have signed up for this semester, aside from my Art History course and my Writing About Art Course, I have been given several assignments that have had to do with self portraiture. In my drawing class this meant doing charcoal sketches and rendering, in 3D process it meant creating a likeness of myself with cardboard, in Digital this assignment was slightly different. The first self portrait we were assigned wasn't even a LITERAL self portrait, it was more a collection of items and images that when smashed together represented who you are in a way. This assignment also stretched my knowledge of Photoshop quite a bit! I am no guru when it comes to technology, I am learning but it's a slow process! However I think this assignment was neat. It took the self portraiture to a different level.
   The boundaries of the project were that you had to select three items of yours to scan to the computer, one physical part of yourself, something that you've drawn, and use two digital photographs either of you or that you have taken. This is how mine turned out:

   Here I used my hand as the physical part of myself, partially because it was the easiest thing for me to photocopy and I've never had to scan anything other than pictures or documents! My objects were my necklace which was given to me by my friends mom when we lived in Spain, some silk sunflowers, and a masquerade mask I got from one of those small side stores in the mall. That one had to be my favorite, it has musical notes on it and delicate gold patterns around the edge. My two images are the black and white picture of me drawing in a windowsill and another picture of me from which I took the glasses and the eyes. And last but not least the drawing included is that owl in the right hand corner which is also reflected in the glasses above. Each item was picked because I either liked it or it meant something special to me. The sunflowers reflect a lot in my life, living in Spain in particular which is also where my necklace came from. I think for my first real Photoshop assignment this wasn't too bad!

   The storm rolled through Maryland quickly and gave me plenty of time to sketch, catch up on sleep, and work on that plaster mess that is due this week! That project and the watercolor in Illustrator will be up by the end of this week, so until then...or until I find something equally amazing to talk about...see ya blogger land!

System Drawing/Painting

   Well the system drawing is done! It really is more of a painting in my case but I am pleased with how it turned out! I wound up downsizing the canvas a little bit to better suit my materials. Below are a few images showing the surface on which I was drawing/painting, the project half way through, and the finished product. There were a few issues that popped up in the process of making this larger version!

   First off as you can tell the surface is much different than the original small mock up. It was slightly textured thanks to the paper cut outs pasted against the canvas, small wrinkles created a pattern whenever I would put the buzz light year shoe print on the paper. The paint also didn't absorb like it did with the canvas material. However despite these slight short comings the surface worked well over all! And I kind of liked the way the paint stood out against it instead of absorbing.

   About half way through and I started having some issues with the face! I realized something. Whenever I am doing a portrait of someone I tend to try and be kind with the image, make a larger nose smaller or cheek bones more defined etc. I don't do these things on purpose, it just kind of happens? Anyways I realized while painting this that I kind of made her nose much smaller in the mock up of this project, it didn't really look like her. So when I tried to remedy that in this version of the painting it kind of looked strange to me. Now that I've finished it and I have had some time to put it aside and then look at it again it looks much better to me.

   And this is the finished product! My thought process behind this portrait was a bit different. The portrait is of Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut in space. I could have done a lot of different things that had to do with space and her being an astronaut but I wanted to approach this differently. I wanted this image to express more about her than just her job. As I said in one of my previous posts where I discussed the mock up for this project I wanted to focus on her connection with children seeing as it was one of the few parts of her life that she shared with the world. In the mock up it didn't really come across as I'd hoped because people couldn't really see the boot print very well on the small scale. I attempted to remedy the error in communication of my idea here with the background. I made several "stickers" of the kind you would see as a younger student in school. Rocket ships, pencils, crayons, planets and stars, my hope is that this would lighten up the atmosphere of the piece. The comment made before by my professor was that it was very graphic and that in part didn't communicate my idea.

   I might be writing quite a few posts over the next few days seeing as Hurricane Sandy is suppose to be hitting us over here starting tomorrow and carrying through until Thursday! So I will be confined to my work and hopefully will have plenty to show and talk about by the time it's through. I have a few requests for tattoo designs in the workings and of course my class work. Until then I will bid you all adieu!

Themes and Ideas

This week I've been asked to talk about my own art work and the themes and ideas that seem to reoccur throughout my drawings and paintings. I have to be honest I really haven't thought about that very much! I do tend to gravitate towards portraits, drawing nature, and I have a fascination for old buildings. I tend to be very meticulous in my art work as well as most other aspects of my life, I blame that on my fathers OCD I swear it rubs off. I'd say that that is my style as of now, I like to try to render drawings as closely to the actual object as I can. I almost don't like to pin down my style though because right now that is constantly something that is growing and changing as I learn different techniques. I'm sure my themes will have changed years from now as well! But for now much of my drawings tend to stick to those three categories  portraits, nature, and old buildings.

Human beings are fascinating. We truly are. The amount of expression that can be captured in the lines of our faces is something that has always captured my attention. It's what makes drawing portraits so much fun for me. I think that is why I gravitate towards that theme at time. Most of my portraiture is in black and white, I think that pulling most of the color from the face really makes the individuals features speak for themselves. Seeing as my first two years at college I was a biology major I'm constantly looking at the face and seeing the underlying workings of it. I like how it is a bit of a puzzle to be solved, being able to make an image on the paper seem living and breathing, to make the image look as if it is oozing some sort of emotion.

My theme of nature I think is derived from this liking of people. Drawing things from nature often requires you to solve the problem of making the drawing on the page seem ALIVE. At least when you are going for realism which seems to be something I am consistently striving for. I think that my love of nature is also just a big part of me, many of my best memories have been made outside in the open. Nature is taken for granted far more often than not. I like to draw it because I think it is beautiful. And I don't just mean the flowers when I say that. I like unconventional beauty as well. I see beauty in simple things, even in ugly things sometimes. I think there is something to be said about things people consider ugly. The skull of a bird, bugs, the way grass shoves its way up through the pavement, dead leaves, all of it holds interest to me. It is a part of life and I tend to draw what is going on around me from the people I am with to the surroundings. I like to make the animals I draw quirky at times. Like my owl wearing converse or the topsy turvy bird I drew from a while back. That quirkiness gives the animals an almost cartoon feeling at times.

As for the old buildings! I like when there is history behind objects. For example, a hair ribbon looks like nothing more than a piece of ribbon until the owner tells you that the ribbon was from her grandmother who use to tie it in her hair for her when she was little. There are so many stories behind so many little things, the big things such as buildings have their own history and lives. Old movie theaters, churches, broken down buildings,  I love looking at the different architecture. I think the older a building gets the more character it builds. In that way buildings are very much like people! I usually take a different approach to this theme however. Less realism and more realistically conveyed textures and strokes. You can make something FEEL like it's real without rendering every little detail as long as you include enough detail to give a hint of each thing.

Basically my themes are objects and people with their own history and background. I like to convey that history through the portraits and drawings I do. While that is my theme now I can't say that that theme will carry on throughout all of my work. College is where you begin to figure that all out, it's why we take classes! The classes to me aren't just assignments, they are meant to push our boundaries. The classes I take now push me way out of my comfort zone! Not only do they do that but they are also constantly teaching me new methods and new ways to approach projects. I have been trying to stray from my meticulous nature and be a little more expressive when I paint, letting myself loosen up a bit! Not only that but I feel like my style is constantly changing because of all that I am learning here! SO, while my themes pretty much stick to these three areas, I feel that this kind of thing, themes and styles, they are constantly changing.

Systems

So the world has been a bit crazy as of late! I have finished a few projects but a midst the madness I hadn't had time to update here and so here we go with post one of the update posts. The self portrait drawing is finished, the version I'm posting here is my mostly done version, I did tidy things up after and will edit this post once I get a chance to take a picture of my latest version. The drawing was done completely with charcoal pencils and vine charcoal.

 This next piece is actually just a mock up of a current project I am doing for my Drawing Observation and Invention course but I'm really REALLY excited about it! The assignment was to take a portrait of someone well known, famous really, and to draw/paint the portrait of that person but create your own system to accomplish that. The goal is to be able to think out of the box, use materials in unconventional ways and have fun with it! My individual that I chose to do a portrait of is Sally Ride, the first American Woman astronaut and a pioneer in multiple aspects of her life. Through my research of her I came across several things that were interesting. Much of her private life was kept very personal up until her death this past summer, but a lot of what you find when you search Sally Ride in any search engine are her programs for kids. She co-wrote 6 children's books on space with the aim to attract more children to science as well as creating Sally Ride Science which helps to supply schools with supplies for science classes and holds many programs for children. This aspect of her intrigued me, her love of children was one of the aspects of her life that wasn't hidden. So I proceeded with that thought and out came this mock up! I used the foot of a buzz light year action figure to create this portrait. The final will be MUCH larger in scale and probably atop of thousands of stickers or pages of her children's books I haven't decided yet...but here is what I have so far!

I will post up on Sunday once the final is finished with pictures of the final process and how it all turns out. As for any other projects! Still working on my current 3D project, that will be up in the next week including processing pictures and a detailed blog post on the horrors of plaster and how to fix the mess! I am still working on my water color in illustrator, which is coming along slowly but surely. People were right, you either love Illustrator or you love Photoshop! I Am finding I am quite the Illustrator fan, I just like the way it feels like I'm still creating my own work, painting on the computer but with more precision.

Anyways, tomorrow will be filled with more painting! More painting and another blog post or two! Goodnight blogger world.

Admiration

Lately I've had to look at artists for more than one of my courses. This blog post is part of an assignment for digital but the artist that I am going to be writing about is one that I've been researching for my upper level writing about art course! Funny how things work like that sometimes!

Anyways, this artists name is Walton Ford and he has rapidly become one of my favorite artists. This isn't just because of the skill in which he manipulates his materials, it is largely because of the multitude of meanings that his paintings hint at. At first glance it just seems that the subject matter in each work is an animal of some sort, or a grouping of animals. When looked at closely however these large scale water color paintings tell a different story. These paintings have details the satirize colonialism's history as well as the impact of slavery and other political subjects. Some images contain folktales, jokes, and high brow lessons in colonial literature! The key to understanding these slants and metaphors is in deciphering the clues he has included with the animals in the paintings. He says that his work contains animals in human culture, animals within the human mind.

This first image is from his exhibition "Bestiarum". It does an excellent job visually explaining his whole concept of animals in human culture. Here we have a group of monkeys, the closest thing genetically to human beings, fighting over table scraps and generally creating a big mess in the process. There are monkeys sitting on the table eating, sneaking food from the others, there is even one monkey who appears to be reading as he sits in a chair at the head of the table. Parts of this are very humanistic, such as the monkey reading the paper. Other parts show a much more animalistic nature which I believe comments on the unrefined side of human beings. The table manners get more and more out of control as you go down the table and see they are literally ripping off the table cloth and knocking each other over!

I like this image because of that mix between humanity and wilderness. The pillar in the background with the terrace make this seem like a more refined setting which completely offsets the chaos at the dinner table. Most of the colors he uses are earthy with the exception of the table cloth which stands out sharply against the tan and brown and green seen throughout the rest of the painting. Also, the fact that this was done in water color is astounding to me. I have always had a bit of trouble with water color. My paintings turn out nicely but they don't look like I've used watercolor because I don't use them the way they should be used. Water colors are suppose to be layered over and over and I don't have the patience. I just go. Sometimes I might have a couple layers here and there of color but usually I just go at it and what happens happens! So it never fails to impress me when I find an artist who can use water color to this extent.

The second painting I've chosen is one titled Nila. Very obviously it is a painting of an elephant! The musculature of the elephant seems true to its living counter part. Even the textures of both hide and ivory are fairly realistic. The one thing that strays from realism is the enormity of the beast. It's size seems to be exaggerated by the surrounding birds and even the ground that it stands on. The elephant stands a lone giant in a world filled with small feathered mammals. The background is understated, just an off white sky set above cracked brown dirt with hints of grass peaking up here and there. The work is also divided in a unique way. Each different species of bird is separated from the others by being placed in its own specific box within the piece. It is as if each is its own composition within the greater composition of the elephant.

As for the hints that make this painting more than just an illustration of different mammals! The elephant, who could be a symbol for India or Africa seeing as that their Native territory, is being swarmed by all of these different species of birds. However, none of those birds are the type that one would normally see picking flies and other bugs off of the hide of the elephant. They are birds that would be found in the west, and in effect they are parasites. This could in turn suggest that the west has become a parasite to lands such as India and Africa. These small details create a story and are why I love his work so much.

The third and final image that I've chosen of Walton Ford's is called Falling Bough. Here again there are a multitude of birds. At the forefront you can actually discern one bird from another to an extent, keeping in mind that this image is much much larger than it appears! The farther back into the image you get however the birds become much less apparent and the focus becomes this roiling turmoil of motion. The whole image gives off a distressed feeling, even the small branch seen in the left hand corner of the image is broken off. The colors of the image are all mostly dark and subdued with the exception of the few birds distinguished in the foreground helping to carry the fallen bough of the tree.

This image was mainly about the artists disgust with enormous number of passenger pigeons that use to populate the planet. He blames the birds in this case, making them the destroyers of the tree branch that they have broken under their weight. He emphasizes that as they carry away the bough they continue their constant bickering and picking and fluttering about without a care in the world as to what they are destroying in their path. As I had mentioned the branch in the corner also appears to be broken, at closer glance it is evident that the artist has also carried out his theme in this small area of the painting by placing a bird on the broken bough. The branches are again being broken by the weight of the pointless nattering birds.

These are just a few of my favorites of the images that Walton Ford has come up with. They impress me in color, size, and accuracy as well as in meaning. Many of these paintings are over 18 feet tall! Sometimes I feel I don't look into other artists often enough and his work has proven to me how much that has to change! 

Anywho, I will post later about the online project as well as some sketch book ideas etc. I'm hoping to have the online project finished tonight! See you later blogger land!

Artistic Musings

Day three of the home-bound debacle. I did do work today but none of which I can put up here! Most of it was done in my 3D sketchbook or in Photoshop. Instead I had a bit of a rambling artistic thought and that thought was this: When do you really feel like an artist?

I mean it, when are you finally able to look at your work and just instinctively know that you are an artist, when do you feel it? Professors like to tell you that you are in effect an artist right now, but I know that most of us including myself don't feel that way. I feel like an artist in training. Of course I love what I do and am having so much fun! I suppose that the time when one feels like an artist is an individual experience...but there has to be a generalized time when you just feel it doesn't there? Like after your first exhibit, or after your first big commission or job? I was watching this show off Netflix the other day and one of the characters said something that really struck me. He said that even though he was a lawyer, he didn't feel like one. That he still felt like he was playing dress up in his fathers clothes and would be found out at any moment. Sometimes that is how I feel. Like I'm playing dress up in grown up clothing and sooner or later someone is going to drag me back down to earth kicking and screaming.

I think that that is what's so wonderful about the art world though. You never have to come down to earth. I know that feeling of accomplishment will come eventually..but like I said. Right now I'm just an artist in training. That is what school is for after all isn't it? I don't think you can really LEARN to be an artist, but school is there to cultivate your talent and help you to translate all of those ideas in your mind onto a canvas or something similar. They give you the tools for your craft.

Well! Tomorrow I will have some more pictures to post hopefully! I'm thinking about doing a really gross series on the inside of my throat as I've had mono. Except make several versions ranging from the realistic disease to a cartoonized version of little monsters running up and down my throat infecting me with their disease ridden fingers. I'm pretty sure I'm going to start in on that tomorrow just for fun, it's my sketchbook after all the professor said it should be a place for random-ness and individuality!

Beginning of the Sketch A Thon!

Day two of at home illness nursing! My brother is actually going through rooms in the house he never enters just to avoid coming into contact with me, it's like I'm typhoid Mary! Anyways, today consisted of sleep and practice sketches in the sketch book and work on my Digital project! I feel like I've kinda over done it in that area because now I have two working drafts and I don't know which concept I like. So me being me I'm going to finish both drafts and then pick which one I like as the final at the very end. And maybe print the other one just for fun anyways.
The first image here was actually the second reconstruction I did today, I just like it the best out of the two! The original is by Gustave Courbet and is called The Desperate Man Self Portrait painted in 1845. My sketch was done only in vine charcoal once again. I would say it's because this was only meant as practice...but the shameful reality is that my charcoal pencils were all worn down and I was way too lazy to lazy/exhausted to actually go get a

sharpener from the drawer in the kitchen! So I stuck to vine charcoal today which is desperately in need of some serious spray fixative. In fact I kind of despise vine charcoal it practically falls off of the page if you breathe too hard I don't think I did so bad on this fellow! He was actually a lot of fun to draw because of how dramatic his expression is. It's as if he just woke up and realized he has an exam that started 10 minutes ago. I am familiar with that expression. I chose this image to draw partially because of that very expression and partially because of the way the shadows play on his face and his arms. It really emphasizes the planes of the face and the three dimensional quality of the features. The muscles in the neck and arms are also very defined. The sternocleidomastoid muscle is in sharp relief there on his neck which plays a part in the lighting I would think. In order for that muscle to stick out that way his head would have to be turned, muscles strained, it plays together well with the artists over all concept. I think as far as my reconstruction went I managed to do a good job on the upper half of the head and the quick sketch of the hands/shirt etc. The lower half of the face I shortened slightly. When looked at by itself I think that the proportions of the face still fit and it still looks pretty decent but when compared to the original.

This second sketch I'm not as big a fan of mostly because I don't think I picked a very good reference painting this time. The painting is gorgeous don't get me wrong but for the purpose of what I am trying to learn I don't think it fit very well. I just kinda got caught up in the pretty face. And THEN I ran into vine charcoal issues! Seeing as this was the sketch I did first today I had to cover it while doing the other sketch. Yeah it got all wiped off. All of the shading, and in particular the lips, got smudged leaving the outline and vague shading that didn't make sense. I tried to fix it but the mouth needs to be redone most definitely. At least the lower lip does. Looking at it like this is actually making me mad I just wanna fix it now! But oh well I will work on it in the morning!
The reasons I chose this image initially were because of the light in her hair. I really liked how the artist made it feel as if it was real strands of hair without spending time drawing out every strand. The way he treats it is almost gestural. I was also attracted by the fact that her neck looks so skinny she could be anorexic. How does a neck that thin hold up someones head? I don't think it's possible, especially because compared to her neck her head does look rather large. This painting, A portrait of Julia Saner an up and coming model, was created by an artist named Danny Roberts. The fact that it's of a model kind of explained the whole stick like neck, and really makes me worry about the whole concept of anorexia in the modeling industry...I mean when did THAT become the standard for beauty in any country? But that is completely off topic! The point is, I think my sketch exercises for the day were pretty beneficial. By analyzing my own work up against artists such as

Roberts and Courbet I find that I am coming to a better understand of what works and what doesn't when working with the human face. Roberts painting does give the illusion of weight and a three dimensional form but not in the same way as Courbet's. His shading is more subtle, lighting more even, and it's a little harder to imitate because it the planes of the face aren't entirely clearly defined. It's like when you look at a person standing in front of you. Yes you can draw that person, but in order to do so you have to work out where the planes on their face are and how the light is hitting those planes etc. It can be tricky! Courbet uses very strong lighting that clearly defines all the planes, even though the light source itself seems a little ambiguous (both arms are in harsh light but on opposite sides? I'm still trying to figure that part out). I find this kind of work interesting though. One artist strove to show the beauty of the person, the other strove to show the emotion and personality.

Yet another long post! I don't know who reads this but whomever you are I am sorry that I seem to be rambling so much! But this is an art blog and these are my thoughts on said art. Plus...I'm sickly and have nothing else to do besides work on my projects, write here, and watch Gilmour Girls on a loop while I fall in and out of sleep!

So goodnight blogger land! Tomorrow will bring more musings, rantings, ravings, and hopefully more sketches. Until then!

Bronzino Reconstruction

So, I am confined at the moment to my parents house because of all things I had to come down with it appears that I have mono! I blame it on public transportation. Anyways because of this I will be writing here a lot more over the next few days since I have off from school for the rest of this week and will just be working on..well school stuff..while trying to rest and get functioning for school Monday! Basically in my misery I am going to inflict my rantings on my lovely blog here, all about art of course but far more detailed than they have been recently because I have the time to talk and think!
This entry is...more practice for that final project in my Drawing Observation and Invention course! This was a lot easier to do though in my opinion. When you look at another artists work and try to imitate their style and recreate the piece the planes of light are already defined, it is simplified for you. As my professor says, doing reproductions is like learning from the masters. They become your teacher as you try to solve the problems they already found solutions to by picking apart their work and imitating it the best you can. Our assignment for homework was to do this with Bronzino's painting Portrait of a Young Man. Seeing as we were instructed to use charcoal (that is the medium that our final portrait will be done in) the challenge became slightly greater. How do you imitate PAINT with CHARCOAL?? Ideally he chose this painting because it simplifies shadows, showing a clear sense of where the light is coming from, and there is a solid feeling to the young man in the portrait. He has "weight" to him as my professor would say.

Honestly I tend to find the young man in the portrait a bit pompous. It doesn't help that I had this image recently in an art history exam so I'm geared towards thinking that. This is only a cropping of the actual image. In the actual one you see his whole torso and his arms, two bannister looking objects near him, and a book in one hand. The banisters are adorned with mythical figures heads that pretty much stand for foolish youth! He was poking fun at those who thought that he was in fact a pompous and foolhardy young man without any real good sense. I think knowing this about the painting helped me to work on the reconstruction, I looked much closer at the features and was able to attribute emotion to them. For example, his eyes have always looked kind of sleepy and aloof to me. As if he is just tolerating whatever it is you might be saying. His eyes are also slightly...skewed really. When the painting is looked at head on it looks like he has a lazy eye! One eye looks straight ahead at the audience
while the other eye looks over to the side slightly. According to my art history professor this was to give the painting a bit of life and make the eyes appear as if they were following you when you walk past it. Meaning viewed from the side it's suppose to still look like it's looking at you. I don't know if that actually works or not...but it is definitely interesting!

My reconstruction was done in two nights, mostly because my illness is greatly impairing my ability to sit and work through anything all at once due to pain and exhaustion! But after those two nights of working on it this is what I came up with! Not perfect I know, but I think it's pretty good! I tried to focus more on the face and the accuracy of the shadows than on the clothing...mostly because there are a lot of folds in that clothing and I really don't think that was the point of the assignment! Looking at it now I realize I subconsciously fixed the eyes so that they were facing the same direction.  And I think that I made his posture better? In fact I think my version is even more lazy than Bronzino's! But all in all I enjoyed doing this portrait, I enjoy reconstructions period. Each one is like a personal challenge. You are trying to be as good as someone who has already been proven GREAT.
Seeing as I have Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and part of Sunday here at the home of the parentals I'm going to use that time to my advantage! I will be doing a few more portrait reconstructions in my sketchbook, just with pencil but all focused on shadows and depth of the figure. I have my portrait here to work on as well but I won't post that until it's finished. I have my 3D Process sketch book to work on which should be fun, my professor thinks of our sketchbooks as collages and journals and whatever we want them to be. She instructed me to have many pages filled out on Tuesday of next week because I'm missing class this Thursday. I also have art history stuff here to read up on, and another kind of self portrait for Digital! I'm kinda excited about that one because it isn't a literal self portrait! I get to make things interesting and play with photoshop some more! I also might have a paper to start revising all things depending!

So yes! Lots to do which means lots of posts here as well! But for now this invalid needs to get some sleep, so goodnight until tomorrow Blog Land.

Foggy self

A quick 15 minute sketch of what my final will look like...very vague but I kind of like it like this. As if I'm looking through the fog or something its vague but still enough so you can tell its me in a way. This is done with vine charcoal and a regular pink eraser.

Sketchity Sketch!

So here is what I have been up to!! Again...for the umpteenth time my phones camera isn't the best but this will at least give everyone an idea. In my Drawing Observation and Invention class we have been working on portraiture for this first unit. Meaning lots of self portraits which is of course new territory for me! New territory seems to be a theme this semester. I feel like self portraits are difficult anyways...I have never looked at my face and tried to see it's planes and angles and shadows before...and that's now all I can see. Anyways, the assignment was to practice drawing our noses, eyes, and mouths. And thus here it is!







Yeah...alotta practice! Tomorrow begins the final draft of the portrait. I have already done one mock up and another will be done tonight, both will be posted tomorrow! For now I am off to write a rough draft of a paper comparing two lovely statues from the Baltimore Museum of Art for my Writing About Art class! Writing writing writing!