ASSIGNMENT 1

It became obvious as soon as i started this assignment piece that it was going to be a very personal and emotional piece for me to do. Being asked to chose objects that evoked an emotion for me i found myself choosing items that portrayed my family life.

I chose my partners favorite aftershave as just the smell of it makes me feel calm and happy reminding me of him. A bottle of sand, the sand is from beaches we have been on holiday to as a family and holds a lot of memories. My little boys favorite toy his Captain America shield and his moon night light (me and my son both love space and astronomy and is something we share), my cats food bowl and a cork from the bottle of champagne me and my partner shared on the night we got engaged. To most people these would just look like very non descript everyday items but to me when they are put together they portray a snap shot of my family life.


Again i used my daylight lamp to cast a shadow across the objects and loved the reflection the glass bottle had on the wall.

I wanted to do this piece on quite a large scale so chose A2 medium surface heavy weight cartridge paper (100lbs/220gsm). i chose a heavy weight paper as i knew i wanted to use charcoal with a fixative spray to build up layers in my work and that i was also going to incorporate some ink into the piece so wanted a paper that would hold up to all the layers, i also wanted a medium grain as i needed some tooth to hold the pigment from the charcoal.

I first sketched the objects out using a 2B graphite pencil to ensure i had the proportions and angles correct.


I used what i had learnt in the exercise on "shadows using blocks of tone" and started off by mapping out all the lightest and darkest areas first. This works well as i then had a basis to judge the tone of the other values against. using the fixative spray i was able to work on top of darker areas with lighter and even white charcoal to pick out highlights and help to emulate the texture of glass and metal.


At this point i could have called the piece finished and had a still life piece i was reasonably happy with that would have shown a snapshot of my family life but with this turning into such a personal piece it just didn't show the emotion that is going on in my family life at the moment. In the piece i wanted to show the emotion that the outside world doesn't see. Because of some hard circumstances going on in my life at the moment my usual happy family is suffering and the feelings of despair, anger and upset are high for us all at the moment, this is one of the reasons i did the piece so dark in the first place.

I went back and looked at the marking making piece i did on despair right at the beginning of this assignment and was drawn to the way the ink i had used dripped down the page almost like dark tears.

I then used black Indian ink on my final piece to portray the despair and sadness i felt while doing this piece. I wanted to convey the hidden feelings the outside world don't see and that's why i decided to use the ink in the shadows of the piece.


I look at this piece now finished and am very pleased with how it turned out, i was surprised at how personal and how much emotion a still life piece would provoke in me. If i was to change the piece at all i would have left the ink spills to just the shadows and not from the top of the paper but overall i am still very happy with the work i have produced here.


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