Kids sometimes do weird things. I've been thinking about why we do the things we do. And that's what this work is meant to do: to document the culture of teenagers and get people to think about why they do what they do. I started by asking a friend to be a model. I then sketched out the figure, taking a lot of time to make it right. A good ink drawing starts with a good pencil sketch. I tried to pay special attention to wrinkles in the shirt and details like the fraying bits of the jean rips. I struggled particularly with the face - I need more practice with drawing faces. After that, I made a stencil of a rotational design and used acrylic to paint five of these decorative elements around the figure to add to the rotational movement. I went for a messy aesthetic as if the background design was block printed. In the end I decided that the background would be better black than white. (The last few steps are not yet pictured) I just have a few more polishes to make to this before critique on Monday. This process has been interesting for me because it's the first time I've made a project without a prompt, which is something that I struggled with especially at the beginning. But with a deadline so close, there's no option but to work. There's not much time to be indecisive. Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline. My favorite thing I've done is dabbling in fumage, the technique of using smoke and fire to create artwork. I experimented with different types of flames and found that a birthday candle worked better than a match. I attempted to draw a face using smoke, which is somewhat visible on the left side of the page if you squint. The soot is easy to smudge and scratch, which I also minimally experimented with. The best thing about fumage is that the process is very evident in the final product - the audience can smell the fire, see how the smoke went across the paper, and can see where the paper actually caught fire. This is definitely a technique I want to explore more officially and at a greater scale.
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Art made from unconventional mediums has intrigued me for a while. I've done some experimenting with unconventional mediums in the past - see the Banana-A-Week series in Sketchbook > 2018. Staples are something that we have in excess and also something that can be manipulated to resemble lighter and darker values.
This work started with a foam board. I then painted it using black paint and a foam brush. While the black paint was drying, I got my sister to take a photo of me using dramatic lighting, deciding to not wear a shirt for added artsiness. I cropped this photo using the Golden Rectangle as a compositional guideline. After that, I used a projector to trace the outline onto the board. And then came the hard part: implementing values using staples. I think that people think of art as a dark medium on a white background, but with subtractive drawing that is reversed. This work is meant to challenge the traditional idea of art by using a light medium on a black background and also by using staples, not a conventional art material. As always, I am not one hundred percent satisfied with this work. Portraits are already remarkable difficult subjects, and depicting all the intricacies of a human face using staples is even more difficult. In hindsight, I wish I had chosen an inanimate subject. I also wish that I had only drawn the contours instead of bothering with the shading. I find the contours on the left side of the work to be much more clean-looking than the shading on the right. But by the time I realized that I was already too far in. I also struggled to depict dimensionality in the nose. These errors are justified because this work is not about accuracy but about the idea of art. From this project, I learned that oftentimes less is more. This is something I learned and relearn in art. Working with an unconventional material is something that I still am intrigued by and intend to pursue in further projects. |