Assigment 2: Self Critique

The artist that I chose for this project was Bart Exposito. Exposito uses almost exclusively geometric figures and his paintings each have a strong graphic design feel to the them. For depth in his paintings, he uses a variety of colors. He is also very good at keeping the weight of lines different throughout his works.

The theme that I had chosen was objects that people use in their everyday life. For instance, q-tips, toothbrushes, iPods, headphones, computers, etc. All of my other themes were very abstract and I had difficulty relaying my theme to my viewers through the sketches. I thought this theme was something everyone could relate to and that was easily realized by people viewing my compositions.

At first, I was drawing heavily from Bart Exposito's style, creating a lot of sketches that were very abstract. What I quickly realized, however, was that my sketches would not have any other color besides black and white and so Exposito's style would not exactly coincide with my paintings/sketches. The only element that I really ended up using from Exposito's work was to vary the weight of my lines throughout the work.

My movement composition was of a ear bud from a pair of headphones. I then used the curves of the cord to emphasize movement, often cutting the cord in and out of the border and bringing it back into the frame with greater/lesser weight. I had tried to emulate the infinity symbol with the curves of the cord. The idea is that if you followed the cord, your eyes would never stop moving because the cord was always going in loops. In hindsight, maybe I should have made the actual earbud smaller so that more of the cord was exposed.

My repetition composition was of the binding of a notebook pad. I had always wanted to use the a notebook as an object, but I had difficulty drawing an image that really appealed to me. Then I was challenged to look at different perspectives of the notebook, draw closeups, and eventually I started to find a sketch that I liked. I think that I could have made the shadowing of the spiral a bit more interesting. I tried to vary the weight of the shadow throughout the composition and create variance in each repeated element, whether it was the holes or the spirals. I feel like this was the least interesting of all of the compositions.

My balance composition was of a paperclip. This was a very simple design, but I think that it still turned out fairly well. I tried to create balance by off centering two paperclips and cropping them at different points. The vertical paper clip (within the composition) only showed straight vertical lines, while the horizontal paper clip only showed the semi-circle of the end of a paper clip. I tried to place them as to balance each other within the frame of the composition, meaning that they both conveyed the same amount of gravity and that there was an even distribution of white space around the composition. I think that it would have been interesting to portray the objects in a 3-dimensional perspective and not so plainly flat.

My emphasis and economy composition was of the head of a toothbrush. This was the most difficult composition to make because each cluster of bristles needed to have a slightly different shading to avoid over-repetition. At first, I had oversimplified the handle, making it a straight object. For my final composition, I changed it to better represent the curvature of the object. Again, this composition was a close-up that appeared very simple. Although, I did not do it, I thought it would be interesting to invert the colors, making the brush handle and bristles black and the background white.

One thing that I unintentionally did was make each composition a blowup of the object being represented. When I looked at the set as a whole, I realized that their was less variety between the paintings...overall making the designs as a whole a little less interesting.