Grace+B

This quarter I have really been focusing on point of view. Specifically with my piece with the pixelation, it has a child intimately involved with the toy as their hands will be all that is seen of them. The overall theme of this quarter is intimacy I suppose. Everything is viewed up close to the toy and thus how it affects the child. The soldier piece from the second quarter has been expanded here into a broader theme with a smaller piece featuring the chaos of war. All of the men are close together in a tight space, both physically because the piece is small and metaphorically. I like how there are distinct yet undistinct ways to tell one body from the next, how the lines of what is real and what isn't are being blurred. Blurring also seems to be a major theme of how lines aren't exact. In the pixelation, you can't see all of the detail from the initial game and in the teddy bear one, only the things up close, the toys, are clear. Everything in the background is being obscurred or blurred, whether that is for good or bad you don't know.
 * Ambition**

It has evolved to deal more with the negative aspects of toys more so than the positive ones. This has more of been a natural evolution not because I'm more interested in that topic, but it has been easier to find the negative ways that a toy can represent the world. I think this is because viewing a toy in a positive light is overdone. A toy is almost always viewed by the child as a positive role model, it's only in looking back that you see some of the flaws with that particular toy. For example, in my large barbie doll piece, the person is seeing the doll by looking straight up at it, almost as they would look at a barbie doll from a child's point of view. Although it is somewhat seen as a role model, the background is dark and the barbie seems to almost be looking away from the child. Deliberately, I have changed my focus to being more about Barbies and other fashion dolls as a role model for girls and those effects, and war toys for boys, although I am experimenting with a gender neutral toy such as a video game that isn't such a negative consequence piece as much as a commentary of how much children play games that they become emotionally attached to them.
 * Evolution**



I started out with a very broad idea: childhood. I sort of used my teddy bear piece as an inspiration for my initial thoughts of my concentration of the discrepencies between fantasy and reality, whether they are the child's fantasy or the adult's. However, I found myself with too much to work with, so I decided to narrow my concentration to only images of toys and how they affect childhood. What I've really been focusing on, or trying to focus on is point of view, and how to create a unique way of showing a toy, or the child from different ways. For example, I have two Barbie pieces, one of which is still incomplete, of a child literally looking up at a Barbie doll. In one piece the child is laying down on the ground with a worm's perspective of the world and the other makes the Barbie doll massive as the child is literally and metaphorically looking up at the doll. For my third piece I chose to work with a board game with the idea that all the pieces of the game were playing by themselves. The most challenging part is not in generating ideas, as there are hundreds of toys with various distortions on reality, but how to find a way to accurately portray what I want to do. Find a good point of view is also very important and trying to find a new one, or slightly different one, each time has already proved challenging. I've learned that I need to work faster and also that I really need to focus on my materials and plan further ahead about what I am going to do in the current piece.
 * Concentration Generation**



I really liked the aspect in Photoshop of working especially different layers because I found myself creating objects that at one point was in the foreground and at another time was in the back. I wish I had been able to use the liquify tool and the other filters more because I found them very intriguing, but they didn't fit into the work that I was creating. By being able to change and redo parts that I didn't like allowed me a greater willingness to experiment. Since I am working with toys and their various effects on reality, it would be cool to be able to take a realistic painting, picture, or photograph and digitally create a toy and how it affects the environment in which it is placed. Also, if I wanted to create that effect of a massive amount of toys, the replicate tool makes that job very easy.
 * Digital Project**




 * Chaos Project**

The purpose of this project, in my opinion, was to accept that you can't control some of the aspect of the artwork and learn to work with the things that you didn't create purposefully. The purpose was also to experiment with unexpected scenarios and materials to expand what you can do in art. I will take from this project a willingness to experiment and complete full image quickly so you can go back and edit the other parts more completely and see how the whole composition roughly works together. I started out with very dark, exact images. As I continued to work, I gradually added lighter and messier shapes which created a less defined foreground vs. background. The thing that enabled me to bring the entire piece to an end was finally going back in over the red umbrella with very light blue and brown/gray to create an almost raindrop affect that also blended slightly into the background.




 * Three Layers Project**

In the 3-layers project, the strategy I used was to get in the back layer first because it contained no reflectivity. I then moved up to the middle and front layers and got in the basic shapes before layering over with transparent and semi-transparent layers. This allowed me to work back into things and allow things to sit and see how they work within the entire piece. It also enabled me to add in things and more easily correct things in the foreground that couldn't have been completed as easily if they had been done first. As each layer drops further back, it becomes more and more simplistic, so that the eye comes forward. Yet, one of the images with is almost completely obscured is also somewhat more abstract than the others because it fades into the window and comes back out. The strategy of planning things out and working back to front so that it is easier to correct things is essential in the concentration process because you have to know the ending before you get halfway down the road and realize you have no path. I wish that I had absolutely completed the background beforehand though because it would have made it easier not to go back through the transparencies to try and correct the little details that needed to be fixed.




 * Self-Portrait Project**

For my self-portrait project, if light were a metaphor it be a metaphor for love. As seen by the flirtacious expression on the face and the joy in the person's smile, there is a certain happiness in the drawing. However, the hand in front of the face is somewhat questioning. The fan creates an interesting shadow, with pockets of light appearing on the face. Yet, only through the spaces in the fan is the light coming through. There is also a completly dark side to the painting symbolizing a conflict between the light, love, and the dark. It seems that the person is thinking about opening up, thinking about revealing herself completely to the light. But for now, she's still contemplating what acceptance of love will eventually mean. I brought to the photoshoot a willingness to expand myself, a willingness to look foolish or different on camera. In this project, I learned that it's important to get the entirety of a piece on the page and then leave it for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes.



For my project I decided to use a teddy bear as a safety net. My original idea was to view a teddy bear up close because most of the time you see a teddy bear in its entirety, probably being hugged by a child. I wanted to portray a teddy bear in a different light and when trying to decide why a teddy bear would be so close up led me to the idea that someone is holding the bear tightly, up close. To enhance the feeling of the teddy bear as a joyful, comforting thing, I created a colorful background and overlaid the furry part closest to the muzzle with pencil to create the texture of the bear. One thing that I didn't intend to happen was the different ways the bear can be viewed. Initially, I intended the bear to be an extreme close up with with only part of his ears showing. However, depending on how you view the bear this can be the case, or you could see him as poking out of the background, in which case he is much smaller than originially planned.
 * Teddy Bear as a Safety Net**




 * Card Project**