gouache project Katie K

Katie Kravit Guash Project

My artist was Milton Glaser. He's a graphic designer and does anything from painting to drawing to computer design.  He uses a lot of figures and portraits in his work, so I focused on body parts, shadows of figures or faces. 

Emphasis and Economy

For my emphasis and economy piece I was inspired by a painting of a trumpet player that Milton Glaser remade into a concert poster. The concert poster he made really simplified the painting into a shadow and then worked the text into the pattern in the background of the figure. For my piece, I used the same figure's shadow but repeated the background into the figure's body. By reducing the figure into just a shadow, the viewer is able to fill in the rest of the detail itself. The repeating pattern in the background and inside the figure emphasizes the center, but the eye moves around the figure with the detailed design inside of it. 

Movement

Glaser uses movement in a lot of his figures' hair. For example, probably one of his most famous pieces, he uses it in Bob Dylan's hair. So I decided to use movement in my figure's hair too. In his earlier work Glaser did very simple portrait drawings of naked women with lots of shadows and emphasis. So I drew my own figure from a downward perspective to focus on the flow of the hair. 

Balance

Here I tried to balance black and white and thin and thick lines. The face and hair are symmetrical but the difference in the eyes don't make the portrait boring. The rippling effect of the lines around the face make the portrait seem less flat. I used the spikey repetition pattern from a cover of New York Magazine that he designed. 

Repetition

I pulled the ear from a black and white drawing that Miton did. The side ear was small in the background of the picture and I just repeated it in a kind of Andy Warhol style. I flipped the middle one so it didn't get too boring and to challenge the viewer to see the small difference.