Charcoal Erase Self Portrait Process Log

Day One
To begin our self-portraits, we were first instructed to start with our noses. Being that it is the center of our face, it makes sense that we would begin there. It makes a lot of sense, but sense didn’t make it easy =(. My nose took almost 2 hours to draw and nearly another hour to perfect. The formation of a nose without lines was extremely difficult. For my nose, in particular, it reflects a lot of light and has a smooth surface that would be hard to define without line work. It was hard to turn those light areas into a nose without making a definite shape. Professor Ruby saw that this problem was going on for a lot of people, so she asked us to stop looking at what we were trying to draw as just a nose but as a multitude of forms that happen to look like a nose.
Day Two
After noses were established we were instructed to work downward forming the lips jaws and chin. For me, the most difficult part of this session was forming my lips. I am so use to drawing very animated characteristics, so in my error I kept drawing very dramatic features that were not true to me. I was drawing my lips very curvy and unusually full, which my lips are not at all. Also I found it very hard to make natural borders between the area just beneath my nose and the outline of my upper lip. I could see that the line that separated the 2 is hardly noticeable in real life because in reality our faces are 3 dimensional so the merge is not so much defined in line but in space and dynamics. But on a 1D drawing I had translating this difference without running my upper into one. I naturally wanted to display the separation by drawing a concrete line, but that would have ruined the entire image. Trying to get past this urge and really look into the shapes of light and dark and eventually find a way to display lip like forms was the point of the session where I feel like I really started to get a hang of the idea of making the light work for me.
Day Three
Those EYES!!!! Those eyes nearly drove me to my grave! Getting the shape of my eyes realistically right and attempting to get both eyes proportionally equal in distance and girth took a good 2 hours to correct. The cartoonist side of me came out again. I really wanted my eyes to look dynamic and lively but I couldn’t find a very good way to bring the 3D feel to them. On the other hand I had a great time making my eyebrow and lids feel more touchable and real.
Day Four
Thankfully, my face details were finished and I was able to work on some fun extracurricular features such as the shaping my face and adding my hair. I was not AT ALL sure how to go about making my haur. I did not want o have strange chunks of light forms or to overlap features of my face, so I decided to do small lines of light and dark to control the free flow look of hair.
Day 5 and Final Critique
In our final critique, I was able to come together with my classmate one last time to discuss this project. Overall, the task was EXTREMELY time consuming and frustrating, but I really did enjoy the project for all the valuable lessons it provided. The project posed challenges for not only me but many of my classmates of finding proportionality and developing form rather than making shapes. This project forced students to abandon the technique of lines and boarders to having light and dark scales create images. Many of my classmates, as well as myself, faced challenges in hindering our art, in fear of showing a flaw in ourselves. I personally made my nose too small my eyes too shape or my lips too plumped and curved in hopes of not looking…well ugly. I attempted to substitute my unique characteristics for more socially common and acceptable, but when I reflected on my work, I realized that my drawing no longer looked like me, but like a stranger. In the course of this project I learned to stop depending on lines and shape to create image and to find the reality and embrace the uniqueness of things that make that particular feature or person who they are.

For a Final Project, it was a great experience. This semester has been a real eye opener. I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of it, but it was a great learning opportunity. I was able to expand, not only, my way of making art through multiple techniques and mediums, but how I define Art. I came into this course with a single mind set of what art can be categorized as, but I have had the privilege of being exposed to a world of new definitions and levels to Art. Though my future career is not in Art, I am excited to use what I have learned in my own free time doing my own personal art work.

Materiality Project

What Is “Visual Analysis”?
“Visual Analysis is 1. The description of what is seen (not an interpretation), 2. Describing what you know/ can research on about what you see, and 3. The act of putting what you seen and what you know together to make a conclusion.”

In this week, i have had the pleasure of taking visual analysis into a new prospective through the creation of Material imagery. Students were instructed to construct the ideology of converting literal meaning into artistic displays through images of craft work. This project helps display how form and literal meaning create ideas and bring meaning to works of art.

Animal Project:
In the Animal’s Craft Project, students are instructed to created Animal out of various crafts that describe’s the animal’s symbolic abilities and characteristics. This project allowed students to take every day things into creatures with symbolic standings about society such as the ones Ive displayed here. The animal I chose was that of my fellow artist Sadia, entitled “Words I Never Said”, which was a specially crafted winged horse named “Infinity” made from recycled water bottles and gold foil. Infinity, so named for its purpose as a beginning and an end is meant to lick away negative and violent thoughts and replace them with a gold nugget. I found Sadia’s endeavors particular successful, because her ideas are very well read through out her piece. The color of her piece is very eye catching and contributes to her idea of this creature’s purpose for hope. gold is a extremely bright and hopeful color, which make people feel enchanted and inspired. The materiality of Sasia’s craft makes pulls her literal meaning and creation together through her use of light soft material. Collectively, the material adds to the mythicalness of the creature and forces you to look beyond what you know, just as when hopeless feelings consume us: we it is hard to look beyond our hopeless thoughts the possible idea that things may get better.

Graphics Project:
Students also had the option of creating a graphical project in which students were given 2 words of opposite meaning and asked define these word through abstract drawings and images. In this project, i chose to highlight the work of my fellow classmate, Hanna Plank. For Hannah’s words, which were “Boisterous” and “Restrained”, were displayed bedt through the constant use of shape and spacing. In her abstracts of “Boisterous”, Hannah used large round free floating objects, which are represented through an image of bouncing balls in space. These round objects escaped the edges of her pictures and seemed to be in motion through out the work. This freeness of space and use of boarderless circles, reads well to her word, just as boisterous is defined to be loud wild free and ultimately unrestricted, the balls being able to float or bounce freely in these images gives that uncontrolled feeling. As for her Images for restricted, Hannah also translated well through her use of shape and space. Hannah small dots compacted into a small square form and places them into a relatively large space and her imgae is that of uniformly boxed seeds in a large open area on the ground. The square shape in both pictures shows restriction through the creation of boarders around the seeds. Also large space surrounding this smaller form in the middle show restriction as it sets an illusion that one space is compressing another. its extraordinary how such simple forms are able to display each of these worlds.

For my work, which was also done through he graphical method, focused on the words “Flawed” and “Exquisite”. I chose to display my word “flawed” the use of simple and disorganized lines done in sharpie , which are then displayed in images of tattered cloth pieces. My fellow artist enjoyed the form used in this display. They found the edges of the tattered cloth to follow the same disorganization as my abstract lines and spoke a lot to the simplicity of the lines. For “Exquisite”, I chose to demonstrate its meaning through organized shapes and pattern in my abstract and my image was that of a colorful patterned quilt. My classmates enjoyed the complexity and variation in shape and texture and how it made the art more interesting and beautiful because it was symmetry and straight lines. the use of controlled patterns like in quilting makes it “exquisite”, because it gives each element in it individual life and a collective life.

Through this project, I have learned we take the Materiality of art for granted. Many of times, we observe an image and jump holistically into some interpretation on its meaning,but it is rarely that we are force to start which a idea and superimpose upon it a singular image that fits it. Moreover, we neglect to see the work that it takes to formulate these visual definitions and how the simplest image may be a lot of hard work. All in all this project was a eye opening experience and had a few challenges. I found very hard to look beyond social and idealistic images in creating my abstracts and restricting myself from leaping directly to meaning. I had to go beyond myself to work in a vague nature and work the hardest Ive ever had to in hopes of getting my point across. All in all, I would change a thing about this experience.

Value and Form: The Box And Its Process

For the past 2 and 1/2 weeks, My visual arts class has been working on the Idea of value in art and how value in a piece can influence the form of an image. In our venture to demonstrate this ideology, we experimented with the reconstruction of a 2-D box drawing through value pattern cut outs to create a more 3-D image. To begin, or class were asked draw an outline of a box accounting for its 3 D intentions. This process was extremely simple and not at all complex. In hopes of demonstrating the form value idea, we were then directed to create value scales through multiple patterns and methods. To be honest this was the most challenging of the processes. it became difficult to evaluate certain values in hopes of not repeating any of them or failing to show a process through each pattern. For me I chose to simplify this problem through creating values in bright colors and allowing the progressive intensity in colors create my scale, then photocopied those colored scales into black and white to get a monochromatic scale which would be used for my 3D reconstructed Box. Finally we took multiple copies of our 2 D boxes and cut out pieces of it like a puzzle in the corresponding values that we observed during our drawings of the 2D box depending on our position and how the light from that position showed value in the box.
Today, we were able to finalize our experiment and come together to observe each of our works and progress. I must say it was truly amazing. Each student’s boxes were extremely unique and brought the box to life in multiple ways. It was interesting to see each how each person observed the values of the the same box and yet chose a unique way to express those values. Each pattern brought the box to life in multiple way, in which, more stable patterns or solid patterns made the box seem more staggered and still while m ore complex patterns made the box seem very lively and full of motion. I feel like this project brought a lot to the point of Visual Art in which interpretation of something as simple as value can influence how a image is seen and life like qualities

Works By Jessica Burke

In these works create by Jessica Burke, the artist ask that her subject dress as their childhood heroes, Burke brings these images to life through the use of a bold shading technique that gives the images a deep 3D form, Burke’s also makes it a point to display no background or color in her art, but does insist on the extensive detail of each subject, this helps intimate details about each subject without taking too much attention away from the meaning of the images. Jessica’s work speaks a lot to the ideas of gender schema and femininity. Both her subject’s features seem to socially counter act with the hero they have chosen to be, the picture on the left entitled “Stephanie As Betty Rizzo Of Rydell High”, Show the subject as a very “feminine” character, yet her physical appearance seems more rough and masculine. While the image on the right entitled “Paula as Spock of the USS Enterprise”, the subject has chosen to dress as a masculine figure yet her female features are deeply obvious, especially in that the subject is visibly pregnant.

Artist Review: Carrie Mae Weems

This past week, I have had the pleasure of viewing a short interview of artist Carrie Mae Weems, an African American photographer and the 2013 recipient of the Macarthur Foundation Fellowship Award. For over 20 years and presently, Weems constructed and re-constructing award winning photos, videos, and films highlighting the plight of African Americans throughout history. Weems prides herself on challenging viewers to see past the harsh and real nature of her photographs and pull from it the emotion and message the photo is attempting to conceive about the brutality of history, solidification of self evaluation, and radicalness of social stereotypes . I enjoy the idealism of Weems because of how her works co-inside with the ideas surrounding visual art itself. Carrie Mae Weems’ makes it clear that her struggle to evoke emotion and thinking does not lie in the social standings given to the picture, but of the image’s deep expression about what its depicting. Just as in all the world of visual art, Its not really about the picture, but the individual experience it transcribes for those who see it and that that feel is not locked into the social value of the image

Direct Observation Chair Drawing Final

So, it comes to an end. I have finally finished my chair drawing and posting the final result for all to see. Upon this ending, I had the opportunity to critique my work along side the works of my fellow classmates this evening and I must say it was a very eye opening experience. I enjoyed conversing with others on  the struggles and feelings we had towards our own works and just being able to see the verity of detail and expression from the point of view of others. I believe it was hard for each person to accept their drawings fully, but I also believe that the hard work we each put into our chairs made up appreciate the final product at the same time. My chair, in particular, seemed to have room for improvement but I did truly enjoy seeing the the metamorphosis of my work over time. Critiquing with my fellow roommates really helped me realize how ungrateful I was being about my own work, because it could have been far worse. Though, this project is over, I do plan to be more sensitive and patient with my other works as I should have been in this previous one. This will hopefully make my future works more fluid and lively.

Direct Observation Chair Drawing

How exactly do you separate what you see from what you already know? After all, a chair is a chair…, but why does it seem harder for me to trust what I see during this drawing. As you can see my simple drawing of a chair has gone through many… improvements, but in my eyes, my Image still seem intensely abstract. I’ve narrowed my biggest problem down to the proportionality of the back and legs of my chair. To begin, I cannot seem to correctly balance the proportions between the area above and below the seat of my chair: It is either, the legs are too long and the top is too short or vice versa. I have attempted to correct this several time, but I don’t seem to be catching the best possible balance. Also, I find myself having trouble expressing the dynamics of the outer most back leg of the chair. In drawing the curve in the outer most leg of the chair, I seem to be exaggerating that curve so drastically my chair now seems “losing its balance” (so to speak). I have tried to adjust the curve (and assume that I maybe over expressing it because I know it’s there and I want people to know I know it’s there) but it seems to then add on to the issue of my top and bottom proportioning… I don’t know if what I’m seeing is throwing off what I know or is what I know distorting what I see??

Metaphorical Me

As our first assignment, we were asked to find a picture that describes something about us and to then name one thing that about us that one could not overtly assume about you… This was way harder than it should have been. After 20 odd years you would think this assignment would be naturally easy, but for me It always seems to get harder. After 30 google searches and badgering my friends about what they couldn’t tell about me, I found this picture in my sketch book and it become obvious that I had my answers for my homework. The day I drew this picture, I was feeling really down about my family leaving me to meet with our unknown relatives in Central America. I really wanted to go too! so, in my gloomy mood I started sketching randomly. Before then, I hadnt drawn in almost 2 years and I was sure that what ever I was making was going to be completely terrible, considering my lack of practice (After all, Practice make perfect). I sketched for an hour before I was done with the picture and in the end Yes…I thought it looked terrible. So i threw in to my bed side and left it there until my family returned. When my family got back to the States, my dad showed me all the pictures her took during their trip and he flashed by a picture that one of my Cousins had made. IT WAS A SUGAR SKULL! It was amazing that I had just drew a skull just like it earlier that week and now my Cousin created one just like it. Needless to say, I did have to take a second look at my drawing and I realized it was pretty darn good for someone who was a bit rusty and that maybe I was a little critical about my own work… So for my Metaphorical Me, I chose this picture, with the idea that a lot of beautiful things come out of some of the worst feelings you might have and added the fun fact that, most people don’t know that I am my own worst enemy and a bit of a downer on myself. Sometimes I have to just step back and give myself some room to make the good come out instead of always bagging on the negative.