Artwork Progress

 

Since my last update, I have mainly worked on the professional of my physical artwork. Since quarantine has ended, I have worked on basic forms in different forms of mediums, including charcoal, pencil and watercolour, I have printed four separate pieces as a series through lino printing, I've completed a sketch and am currently working with charcoal to produce a portrait.

The basic forms were done to teach us how to create different shapes with different media. When drawing, we can apply these shapes to the image and have a proper idea of size and shading.

The next piece was lino work that had three separate drafts before I printed. The idea behind the initial drawing was to depict a broken camera. In the pictures, we can see how I changed where I put the colour due to stylistic preference. The idea of different colours based on the broken piece was a result of wanting to have more variety and interesting points to the art. I believe that had I printed based on my first draft it would not look as good. 

The next part of lino printing, besides cutting, was the printing part. This managed to confuse me very much as lino printing does not require a press, but wood printing does. The last time I did any form of printing, it was wood printing where we used the press. At first, I only planned to use one colour but have multiple prints to choose from to find the best one. However, my teacher instead suggested that I use multiple colours which resulted in the next three variants being yellow, blue and pink. I chose these colours after it was suggested I use pastel colours.

This helped me find out what I wanted to do with my artboard. This piece (series?) is focussed around broken cameras and impaired vision. This leads me to what I believe my Kaupapa will be. Lying in media. Now more than ever, we see journalists, news industries and photographers taking the situation in front of them and twisting it to their companies beliefs or what will gain them profit. Their businesses profit from the extremities in the lives of celebrities and the accentuation of the worldly situations surrounding us. The media lies and lies again for the entertainment of viewers and the profit of their watchings.

The next piece I did, my sketch, used a camera as its subject. Cameras is something I wanted to incorporate into my artboard before I even knew what my Kaupapa would really be. This shows us woman using a camera, but whos finger is slightly covering the lens. I made one main draft before moving onto the resulting piece as seen. The piece isn't heavily realistic compared to how I would like it to be, however, I'm happy with the outcome as it was one of the first pieces I have done for art and was done before learning about basic form and such. 

One of the most recent pieces I have been working on is one using charcoal. This will be my first solely charcoal piece. This occurred due to the random drawing of a face with long hair and a feather over their ear. I drew this while experimenting as I had no idea what to draw. After my teacher saw it she gave me the idea of expanding upon the premise of the drawing and using one of my own friends as the main subject. From this, I took photographs to base the pictures from and I created a rough draft based on them. I did this in basic pencil in order to not smudge it. The final piece, which I am working on now, is drawn completely in willow charcoal and charcoal pencil. 

The meaning behind the artwork is that the feather represents the past. The feathers references to a quill of sorts. The meaning is that the past clouds the hearing of people in modern times. The ink that I will add soon shows the words of the past leaking onto the face beside the ear. The effects and words of the past cloud what people hear in modern times as they focus too much on the past to see the future.

The Meth PSA - Jessica

Within the PSA Jessica, we witness the narrator tell us about how the harmful effects of drugs have affected the girl Jessica he discusses. He tells us the story of a girl named Jessica who does meth and the negative impact that it has upon her life and the lives of others. For instance, her actions affected her own younger brother when she forces him to smoke meth with her. This is an obvious example of how meth altered her mind severely. Enough that she would force her own brother into drugs. This might affect him later in his life as he develops a powerful addiction. This may be catastrophic as he could influence his friends to do meth with him and cause a never-ending cycle. The purpose of mentioning the brother is to emphasise how her choices affect others, not just her own health. We see this aspect similarly in Walk the Line. This movie displays how Johnny Cash’s actions affect his family and his friend’s mental health as his declines. This is where we recognise the correlation between the characters Jessica and Johnny Cash. Their health and state of their lives worsen as they expose themselves to drugs.