Education is Sweeter
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InspirationRichard Avedon"Portraits that bared the souls of some of the most important and opaque figures in the world"
-Biography.com Fine artist, Richard Avedon used images to show the true side of people that you otherwise wouldn't be able to see in such a way. People called his pictures, "identification portraits" as they sought out to show true sides that not everyone could see. His portraits showed an immense amount of expression and identity which is something that I had in mind while going into creating this piece.
Ashley OsbornIn focusing on photography as well as photojournalism, I stumbled across Ashley who does promotional as well as documentary type of photography. I instantly drew attention from the amount of value used to show contrast between dark and light in her images. This brought out shadows and highlights to strategically place emphasis on certain aspects such as the brands for promotional pieces and self expression for the documentary pieces.
From these pieces, I decided to use her strengths in value and self expression to create my own piece in order to display a sense of identity and expression. |
ProcessAs I began to create, I noticed that I went for facial features first and one of the biggest solid things that caught my attention was the eyes, so I chose to find that first. After I painted the red in the flag, I moved onto the braids which I was hesitant about at first. I didn't want to lose the shape/outline of the braids and throw them out of wack which would make them look distorted. I eventually got over my nerves and painted them solid brown which gave me a sort of guideline when I would eventually add value.
A large part of the piece was the shirt of the girl which at first I couldn't figure out how to tackle. After sitting for a few minutes just thinking, I started to just start painting and see what happened. Eventually I figured out that I'd do a watercolor effect for the top part and a solid black part for the bottom portion. I was debating whether or not I was going to add wrinkles to the black part of her shirt or not just to dimension. I eventually finished her shirt and began to work on the highlight in her hair, but I only painted half of the highlight on her hair simply to experiment and I enjoyed the way that the highlight gave her hair a lot more dimension. I soon finished that half of her head but I was not sure if I needed to do more, so I began working on the monkey behind her shoulder. While painting the monkey, I kept the hair in the back of my head so I could think/debate on what I'd do (whether it be adding more tones so the hair isn't so flat, or even adding a shadow). Next I worked on finishing the monkeys face and beginning to work on the landscape which took me a while due to the amount of realism that the image required. Although that part may of been the hardest, it definitely had the largest impact on the piece (more than any other elements involved). After the landscape, I needed to just finish small details and paint the background which I decided to paint black to emphasize drama. ReflectionAs I created the piece, I fell in love with it the more I painted. I went into this piece with a positive mindset which made my overall work ethic better when I created it. I spent a lot of time working on this piece, in order to incorporate some details. However a change that I would make would be to make the background a different color (other than black). There are already a lot of dark tones throughout the piece and the black background makes the monkey nearly disappear in the piece. Other than that, I am very satisfied with the outcome of this piece and I am excited to create the next piece in the series.
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