Four things, all occurring in close succession to one another, has made me realize just how doomed this project is in its current state.
One is the horrendous color palette I selected, which somehow reminds me both of Thanksgiving and Halloween at the same time (in other words, not very cohesive and definitely not my intention). Another is a general lack of water color ability, which was excusable and less noticeable in my previous project (but has now rendered this project flat and ugly). Third is my utter fear for taking any risks; I would love to emulate Richard Prince's nurse paintings, because hey, if I hate it already, why not take a risk? But there's something holding me back, maybe a fear of making it uglier or something. Hopefully I'll get over this mental block by November 7. Lastly is a lack of motivation to continue. I'm not excited to work on this project, and can only do so in thirty minute chunks before getting bored or frustrated. I just want to move on. This project is draining all my artistic zest and replacing it with a tired defeat. I was able to accomplish exactly 2 things this week. One is finally finishing the letters, and amazing! It's uglier than it was before. I hate looking at it, but it's too late. Second is finally deciding an eye color, partly because I have to, and partly to stop looking at a creepy eyeless woman, and it's...okay. I feel extremely ambivalent about it. I want to throw this project in the garbage.
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I remember drawing with Tommy as a freshman, possibly? Or maybe I was a sophomore. But anyways, the only thing I really remember from those lessons was feeling utterly frustrated. I just couldn't get it. I was too rigid and was drawing contour lines first, filling in second. I couldn't conceptually grasp the other way around, or maybe I was too stuck in my ways to truly try it Tommy's way.
This time was different. Although you can still see my previous problems of focusing too much on the contour, I think I'm getting the hang of figure drawing. I was courageous enough to try out different techniques. In the first pic, you can see how I tried extremely light guiding lines and then using defined contour, while in the second I tried using both defined guiding and contour lines. The third I tried filling in the mass with conte crayon on its side, and then going back with contour. I'm excited to work with Tommy again. I am having a crisis. Work has been slow for my home project because I can't deal with how much I don't like it. My initial excitement has completely died, and I can't bring myself to work on it for long periods of time. I've spent a lot of class and home time on it, but I can't seem to work as quick as I usually do or very effectively. The watercolor, which I thought I was getting a better grip of, is splattering and the execution of this project, despite my careful deliberation before each stroke, may be worse than my first in class project.
I'll talk to somebody on Monday, but for now this home project might as well be on a temporary hiatus. I also don't like the color pallette I chose for the letters, it reminds me of a country's flag for some reason.
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I didn't get to do a lot of actual art-ing this week. I did decide, after much deliberation, what color I want my background to be, and decided that I wanted to have flowers in the background. Possible a Kehinde Wiley type of background where it encapsulates the girl in the foreground.
I DID plan, a LOT. I have a really good idea for my next project. After setting my goal to have my next project to be content based, rather than "oh this would look cool" based. It's going to be my first project that's going to be deeply personal and very specific. It's exciting. This is progress on my home project (first three pictures). The next is the progress (and completion!) of my in class project.
My home project is going ok, but I didn't work on it as much as I wanted to so I could get my in class project done. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to paint the text. My in class project was...disappointing. The process was basically taking a picture of the face, drawing in pencil the general outline, inking it, watercoloring it, cutting it out, and taping up the individual parts of the faces. Cassette tape was then put up around the heads coming from the mouth, fastened with scotch tape. I was really ambitious going into it (12 portraits! amazing final product!) but in the end I feel like it's just underwhelming. I think I'm going to stick to art confined to a piece of paper (like not having sculptural elements to it) from now on; this was not fun. I hung up my piece on the 3rd floor, and I don't think I'll do that again either. The portraits took me a lot longer than I thought; my desire for them to conform to their real life inspiration prolonged the entire process a lot. In the end, I think the whole thing could have been better executed. The whole thing and the final product has a sort of rushed/half-done feel to it, even though it took so long to finish. Hi all, long time no see! I got to make real progress on my home project, which has gone better than I had expected.
So I'm working in a medium much larger than I'm used to. And I'm trying to challenge myself by NOT outlining and then watercoloring, which has been my signature move these past couple of months. I'm really excited to see what comes out of this! The first image is a reference photo I used in the very beginning, but you can tell I quickly abandoned that. You can kind of see the remnants of the girl on the left if you look hard enough. Everything else is what I've done so far; the earrings are inspired by earrings I saw on etsy, for those wondering. As for my other project, I think I got it. I REALLY want to pay homage to Baker v. Carr, a case that broke two justices (and broke my heart when I listened to a podcast about it). (The pics look sideways in the thumbnail, but if you enlarge them they *should* be the correct orientation. Not entirely sure, weebly is acting a bit strangely on my end.) Hi all, first post of Art 4! I'm a little behind (as you can see by the date this is being posted), but I thought I'd update y'all on what I've been up to.
This week was really tough. I was scrambling, disorganized, and stressed about a variety of other things, and I was glad I could do art (just for a little bit) to relax. I was still trying to adapt to the new rigor of my schedule, and making a post this week completely slipped my mind. I was able to do a little bit of planning, though: I was able to do some planning on my home project this week, and some brainstorming on my second in-class project. In light of the recent protest for the newest SCOTUS nominee, and calling back to some jargon I witnessed being thrown around during the 2016 election, I knew I wanted to do something personal to me and feminist-y in nature. I was always drawn to slogan "nasty woman", and one of the most memorable internet comments I saw at the end of a HuffPost article was calling Hillary "witchy". It was memorable in how jarring it was to see the word "witchy" thrown around in a non-Halloween context, and it always stuck to me. So I decided my home project would pay homage to this one internet comment from two years ago. As for my second in-class project, I was still a little lost as to what I should do. I wanted to do something political, and I wrote down a couple possibilities (Founding Fathers? Civil Rights leaders? Maybe a tribute to Jimmy Carter?) but quickly threw them out. I decided that I'd maybe do a SCOTUS case. The biggest part of my project is the concept of time. After assembling my project, I took photographs everyday and documenting the effects time had on the flowers. I took detail shots too. 5.8.175.9.175.10.175.11.175.12.175.13.175.14.17Although subtle, the organic flowers slowly degraded over time.
I began with re-spray painting my pots. The real flowers with the fake flowers. Process. Detail shots.
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March 2019
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