When we were first given the sheet of topics I was immediately drawn to biggest fear, personal narrative, and self portrait. At the top of the page I breifly played with biggest fear and decided to doodle an alligator to see what ideas I had, ultimately that one ran out of motivation quickly. I also thought about drawing a hanging since those disturb me. Then I played around with the idea of doing a selp portrait and drew a square for the different expression ideas I had. Again, I felt low on ideas and inspiration. I moved to trying to draft some ideas. I thought of doing a self portraid/personal narrative about me growing up and the career interests I’ve had. I couldn’t quite figure that one out, then got the idea of following my maternal line which I eventually went with.
For this one I used a reference photo of my great-grandmother from a newspaper clipping announcing her engagement. Initially, I really struggled to get her face right. I was trying too hard to mimic the photo insteadof recreating it myself. Once I allowed myself to be more stylized I ended with a thumbnail I really liked. Then I played with the acrylic ink to pick a color scheme I liked, I also had to be sure that it would work with the color orange, since the next portrait of my grandmother is heavy on orange/red. I wanted to be sure that I could pick one color from each of the pictures to be included in the predcessing photo.
It took a moment for me to finally get to working on the final of this piece as I had covid and lost access to Dana. A friend was able to collect most of my materials (with the exception of my palette) using a tubaware lid I started on it. I approached this first one like I approach my work in other mediums and started with lining it in black. Then I worked on her hair, I found that I really liked the blending of black to brown to orange.
The next day I started on the skin. From here it, in my opinion, went downwards, the way I placed and painted with the acrylic was that I would put it down in one spot then pull the ink from that spot. This resulted in streaks of a varrying degree of saturation all over her face. I simply don’t like how the streaks look.
Then I cut up a brown paper bag that food from the dinning hall had been delivered to us in, and decided that would be the background. I asked my grandmother for a picture of the wallpaper in my great grandmothers bathroom and used it as a reference. Drawing all of the tiny cards, though tedious, was rewarding because they looked cute.
Finally, I cut out the painting of my great grandmother and stuck it to the brown car paper. In the end I didn’t like how it looked and felt that the background made the orange in the hair stand out too much. I wasn’t a fan of the lining, or the texture of the skin.
The biggest struggle I had with this one was in figuring out the proportions of my Grandmother’s arm. In my first thumbnail sketch it ended up way too long, then in the swecond I was able to get the proportions correct. I played aound with my acrylic to get the colors right then dove into sketching.
I decided this time that I would not line the drawing as I disliked how it looked in the final of my great grandmother. Instead I relied on the ebony pencil I was sketching with to provide enough shape. I started with the skin and felt really happy with how it looked. I like the value of tones on the skin and feel like it looks like her face has weight.
In the end I decided to line some parts of it such as her eyes, hand, and the mirror, as I felt those areas were fading too much and I wanted them to pop out. I also included purple to reference the next photo.
I really struggled both with the proportions and the face in this one. This one is of my mother who’s face I’m very familliar with, and didn’t feel like I was properly able to identify what made her face her face, because I’ve seen it so often, I also struggled with the propertions of her relating to the chair.
I started with her skin, which I regret. I blended together blue and red, aiming for a softer perrywinkle to be in her skin. Instead it came out more of a corpse looking color. After that failure I moved onto using the premade violet for her dress. I really liked how saturated and bright it was so I stuck to using it for her dress, though that probably makes the skin tone stand out more, I ultimately like how the dress came out because of it.
I don’t often draw myself so this one was interesting for me. I really hate my nose, so figuring out how to draw it was a big upsetting. In my thumbnail it ended up as a weird blob, then I drew a nose and decided to ignore proportions just to get the placement of the face right. Then finally, on the third try I focused on the placement, and drew a little arrow to remind myself that my nose is pretty flat at the bottom so to draw it a bit more downturned so it doesn’t look like it has an upwards angle.
I also planned to do this one in mostly pinks. However, that plan faded when I used blue ink for my shirt. My shirt in the reference photo is blue and I thought it would be a cute nod to it, as well as to me by using the bisexual colors, so I included the shirt as blue. To try and make it not stand out as much I made the button up I had ontop a blue and red color pattern. However, that just make the overall piece look more blue. I completely gave in and decided to switch to a blue color scheme in the end by painting the whole background blue. I also had a problem where I got two drops of blue on the right arm. I tried to pat it out with a paper towel but that just seemed to make the situation worse.
Overall reflection:
I am somewhat happy with these finals. I am happy for the effort I put into them, I can find things in all of them that I like, and I think I did the best I could have on them. I think I did a good job playing with and exploring color, and for someone who’s main medium is graphite, that was a big risk for me. If I could do one thing differently, I think I would do bigger, more detailed thumbnails that included acrylic ink. I think it would have helped me to play with it more to see how it would act with the portaits and would have helped me avoid some of the mistakes I made