Assignment 1 - Unconventional self portr

Compositional pencil sketches

Assignment 1- Unconventional self-portrait

This task was a combination of pen and pencil sketches where I used the pen to draw on other people's faces continuously and the pencil for sketching different angles of my own face. I would say that the continuous line drawings was probably one of the most challenging parts of the assignment for me, mainly because I never knew or even heard about the term so I struggled a little bit at my first attempt but I was able to manage as I was asked to do a second piece because my first attempt didn't turn out right according to my expectations. However, I had no problem with the pencil sketches but it did take quite some time for me to achieve a perfect sketch.

Tool and technique exploration

This part of the assignment was where I got to explore the use of tools and techniques. After completing my collages and my artworks, I realised that I never actually took the time to even think about how tools could be so useful and that they could come in handy, making a difference to a piece of art which it did to mine. I have used a range of different tools such as cotton buds, ice cream sticks, sate sticks, stirrers, rubber bands etc and some ink to create a few pieces of artwork. I find the process of making these artworks extremely fun because I'm basically using my imagination and playing around with different tools. This, I would say is a great alternative to regular pencil and watercolor artworks that we see hung on the walls everyday. The same goes to the use of newspapers and magazines. Not only we use them to read on a daily basis, but we also tend to use them for art like I did for my collages. What I like about collages is that ideas would need to come from the artist's mind so that the pieces could be put together to tell a story like each of my collages do which is what I'm proud of because It all came from my imagination put together just with pieces of paper.

Final Artwork

I've put a lot of thought into what I wanted my final artwork to look like. Over the past two weeks, I came out with a few ideas that I thought I could use but I just couldn't choose because of how similar those ideas were so I kept those ideas aside and began thinking of new ones. Because our final artwork needs to symbolise ourselves, I came up with a completely different idea where I planned to use color and tools in a different way. As you can see right above, my final artwork consists of a portrait of myself, drawn in two different perspectives. This artwork I've created was inspired by my past. Reflecting back, I've had a couple rough moments with pretty much my middle school as well as my high school life. Because negativity has been brought into my life which somehow began to affect my emotions quite a lot, It has made me as hesitant as lack of confidence started approaching, but as high school came to an end, I started to gain my confidence back until this day. In the artwork, I drew on a bright side of myself where I added on bright colors in the background which represents happiness. Before I started to develop this artwork, I used my imagination and thought of how I wanted to represent the other side of me. I then thought of drawing on my bright side holding up old photos of my hesitant side with dull and grey-ish colours in the background which represents sadness. The two different sides of colors are being blended in so that the artwork wouldn't look as harsh with a line in between. As for the tools, I decided to burn a thick piece of paper as well as newspaper to give the artwork an effect. I added the burned piece of paper on the edges of the old photos and the burned newspaper as my clothing item as well as a few inspiring quotes.