Shape & Colour W22
This photo is one of my favourites taken of my deceased mother. This photo is when she was a child in her adolescence. I don't have a bunch of pictures of my family in general so this one is special to me. Especially since I'm camera shy and I have no friends to take photos of.
When I was exploring with contour blind drawings in the first assignment I wanted to try something busy and out of my comfort zone of simplicity and minimalism. With this Shape & Colour assignment I knew I wanted to keep it clean and "polished".
TASK 1: Drawing Outline
Using my only tool for this project, my MacBook Air. I started to outline the standout features of the face on my trackpad using the pen and curvature tool. The original photo was on my bottom layer at 50% opacity for accuracy as I traced.
Task 2 : Tonal Mapping
As I slowly started tonal mapping my shapes, I wanted to focus the detailing within the lowest and highest points in the face. I thought about my shadows like makeup. Brining myself back to cosmetology I shaped the face like I was contour and highlighting. The black or darkest colour covering most of the surface. As I got more comfortable I played with more colours but still keeping everything monochromatic. The pink being my personal favourite for the sense of femininity behind it. I don't work with pink often so I was pleasantly surprised how fond i was of it! Personally I don't like the blue colours just because I see less of the features and detailing with it. I started to build more shapes on the body and changed my highlight colour to a complimentary colour of a mint, sea-foam green, as pink was my favourite of the 3 colours I experimented with. I also used transparent a transparent stroke on the left bottom and just a regular black stroke for the one on the right.
I started to use the knife tool to section off some shapes for some negative space after I got some critique and taking the next task into consideration and how the empty space will affect it.
Task 3:
I was inspired by the skateboard I owned in collaboration with Indigenous artist Christi Belcourt x Colonialism Skateboards. The photograph of her beadwork and the texture it gives inspired me to use beads I already own.
After multiple trial and errors of trying to make a group compound on a different selection of shapes I succeeded in making a clipping masks with the images of my beads which provided the perfect amount of texture I was looking for while staying in a monochromatic colour palette. I also used a photo I took of some porcupine quills for more added texture.
As time progressed I got alot more comfortable enough to start a complete different colour palette. Clearly inspired by thermal body scans I had the idea from seeing all the different layers and shapes stacked on top of each other. This concept I wanted to use but as I seen it come together the picture made me think of Mike Wazowski from the movie Monsters Inc.
I started to use the knife tool again to snip parts of the head and body to make it look like broken glass or 3-D. I used green for a contrast as I felt like I was seeing too much pink.I used a grain for more texture and it sort of looked like glitter!
