Assignment one: Say hello
In this assignment I need to make a postcard, which describes myself in some way.
At first I had an idea to make a postcard which looks like a book. It should have been a reminder of the fact that people often are judged by the cover. And this cover should have been quite simple. The cover would contain (as any other cover) a name of an author – mine – and a title “About myself”. The last thing was to decided what should be inside, and it was a hardest part.
Who am I and what can I tell about myself? I was trying to answer for the next few weeks. When I think about it, first things that come to mind are some different details. I love old rock-n-roll, to cook tasty things, beautiful things, to read Salinger, to travel, and many other things. In my previous course in a first assingment I was to make postcards too. Three of them, actually. It was quite handy, because I was able to make each postcard about some partcular theme. One of them was done as a collage, containing all the things I like. That style should fit well in this assingment too, but I don’t want to repeat myself.
So, after all these thoughts, I realised that I don’t really know who am I yet. I am learning new things about myself all the time, and I don’t have a complete picture yet. And I began to think how to develope this idea into a postcard. At first I wanted to do a postcard puzzle. It would describe the feeling very well. The picture that you know something of, but is yet to be completed. But than I remembered of one interesting technique I wanted to try a long time ago, but stil didn’t. It’s called grattage. Grattage is a surrealist technique in painting in which paint is scraped off the canvas.
Few examples of how it looks like. I like it, it’s quite spectacular and unusual.
And this is the masterpiece.
The process itself, when the picture is slowly appearing from the darkness perfectly describes the process of learning about yourself.
For this technique you make a colorful background first. After that, you cover it either with was or yolk. Than you cover it with ink. When the ink dryes, you can start scracting out the picture.
It turned out that the ink layer is scratching off much better if you use yolk, not wax. Below are two picture to compare.
Than I thought that the abscract colorful background can be turned into a girl, drawn with watercolour. In the end it will look like a girl under the cover of darkness, and that’s exactly what I need.
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Final one
Categories: assignments, Illustration, Portfolio