…aaaand my final video was featured by the HPA!
see it on their facebook page here:
Thoughts on Art 110
Claire Johnson
Fall semester, 2011, Into to Visual Arts practices.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/additionalharry/
http://www.vimeo/additionalharry
Fall semester, 2011, Into to Visual Arts practices.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/additionalharry/
http://www.vimeo/additionalharry
here’s an almost-done shot of my portrait, and one showing my workspace to scale.
The experience of drawing it was really interesting, and I really enjoyed myself. My plan to use it as study breaks between other final paper writing did NOT happen, I got really in to it today and spent a good chunk of the day on it. Because I was drawing from a combination of sketches, a sketch of the sketches, and a photoshopped layered version of the sketches, it was a different experience than drawing from a photograph or drawing from life. I did much more estimating, averaging, and evaluating than usual. I’m really happy with the way this turned out though. It totally fulfilled my vision of looking almost abstracted, but not quite, and looking not much like any of my sketches but based completely on them. I think it would make a cool series/ mini gallery show to do multiple portraits like this, based on catergories of people- one of family members, co-workers, etc. Or you could do more abstract/less obvious groupings like all my vegetarian friends or all my friends who have ever hurt my feelings. It could get really interesting. As it is though, this one is just an expression of fondness for some great people in my life, which I think it conveys well (partly because the vine charcoal I used is so soft). Success!
5
I did some sketching today as a test- this is still just as small scale as the sketches themselves, and obviously less detailed, but here’s an “average” of my girls. I really think it’s kind of cool.
My big piece of paper that I’m going to do the actual piece on is hanging on my wall, ready for me to start charcoaling it up during study breaks from writing my eternal politics paper and my eternal spanish paper. aaahh finals.
Today I scanned my sketches, put them into photoshop, and with the magic of layers and opacity levels, made a “composite” of the sketches. This isn’t what I want to do for my actual portrait- I want one, slightly abstracted face. But the purpose of this was (aside from being really cool) to help me analyze how to blend the faces, what features to focus on from each sketch, etc. The hardest thing, I can tell already, is going to be the mouth, because each of them are distinctive. I’m really really excited about how this is looking though. And I got my giant drawing paper! I can’t wait to start attacking it with charcoal.
another Thanksgiving sketch, this time of my mom. She was on the phone, and when she finished her phone call she got up and left, so I didn’t quite get to finish her sunglasses or hand but I got the facial features which is the important part for the composite portrait.
A batch of Thanksgiving sketches!
The first one is of one of my high school friends, Catie, who insisted on smiling for the “picture.” The second is my best friend Carrie, who I’ve known since I was seven. She was really happy with how they turned out and I thought so, too! I’m really enjoying the profile view and I’ve found that I always do the drawing in the same order: starting with the neck and chin, then defining the shape of the head, then the nose and mouth, and the eyes last. It’s not exactly a logical pattern but somehow it works.
my first sketches for my final! I hadn’t done life drawing in several months, so I had a lot of fun with this. Kaity, who was reading Nietzshce (her favorite philosopher) for homework, was very patient with me, although she did keep moving because she wanted to read quotes aloud. The first drawing I did with my favorite pen, which is erasable but still looks like nice black pen…it was harder because I was further away and she was moving more, but it was good to get me into the rhythm of things. The second drawing I did is the profile, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I don’t usually draw profiles but I like this one so much that I’m thinking about actually doing the final piece as a profile. I think it would be a interesting and unusual spin on the composite idea.
Composite Portraits
Here is one artist I found who uses overlayed photographs, not complied drawings, to create images that are of “no one but everyone.” I like that he hoped to find some scientific use for this project, such as identifying a “type” of criminal for example. I think that in doing this project I’m searching for something at least sort of similar- though for me it’s not criminals or the mentally ill, of course, but a characteristic of the people who are important to me- what is it that makes them so special? Could this be a way to find that out?
Francis Galton and Composite Portraiture
A contemporary artist inspired by Galton, whose work has been put to use by police agencies trying to find missing children who have aged:
Another artist I found also uses photography, but especially digital photography and webcams. He also pieces the photos together more in the way that I’m planning to do with my sketches, rather than overlaying them like Galton. He calls them “cubist” which I suppose they are in a way because they are distorted so much. I’m not sure how much I plan to “distort” my finished portrait, I think that will depend on the images I have to work with after I finish my sketches over Thanksgiving break.
Art of Ed STASTNY | Camposites | Prints, E-cards
and just one more interesting element: when I searched “composite drawings” this is what I got: again, not exactly what I’m planning to do, but still interesting. Especially since most of the “composites” I have come across so far have had some kind of “use” outside of just art, except perhaps Stastny.
Final Project idea
I love portraits, and drawing faces. I love that I could draw the same person five or even five hundred times and each one would look like them and yet look different at the same time. So I knew that I wanted to do some kind of drawing/portrait project for my final, and in thinking about it here are a few more ideas about how to solidify that:
1. I want to work big for the final piece: big like those giant pieces of paper hanging on the walls of the art building for the hand drawings right now. I’d also like to use some color, not just charcoal or graphite.
2. I think it would be interesting to try to do a composite portrait- like take several drawings/sketches/photographs and mash them up to create one face. The proportions would slightly off but I think it could look really interesting.
3. As for who to draw/use in the mash-up, here’s what I’m thinking right now- my entire life is and has been full of strong female figures. I’m constantly surrounded by them, actually, be it at my all-girls high school, my job in the summer, at home with my mom, or here at Whitman. Many of them have already been subjects of my absentminded sketching, or even a few for formal art projects. But if there was a way to include them all ( or many of them at least) in one portrait, who is at once no one and everyone and sort me all at the same time, that would be really cool, something I could really put myself behind. I could draw most of them over Thanksgiving break and then compile my sketches for the final, drawing an eye here, a nose there, a face shape there.
4. Here’s a list of people I want to sketch, though not all of them will probably be included/possible if I don’t see them:
- my mom Kelly
- my best friend Carrie
- my boss Esme
- my old teacher and mentor Leigh
- my hight school teachers Joan Nyland and Kathy Briggs
- my childhood friends Callie (she’s in Italy, so probably not possible) and Maddy
- my older childhood friend and now co-worker Cora
- my high school friends Catie and Anna and Margaret
- my Whitman roommate Sarah
- my girlfriend Kaity
- my little Celia and her mom, my godmother Andrea
- my Danish aunt Sinje (again, no way unless it’s from a picture)
- any of my Whitman thetas who are around and willing to be sketched
That’s a lot of people. I’m sure I won’t draw them all, and of the ones I do I probably can’t use them all in the final piece, but I’m not sure how that’s going to work yet anyways. In the meantime, I’ll start sketching, and look up how and if other artists have done anything like this with their portraits.
