Assignment 2

Inspiration

For the purpose of our second assignment, I chose Shepard Fairey as my source of inspiration. I actually hate I’m actually not a big fan of Shepard Fairey and only picked him because his work is most similar to the genre of art I wanted to work with. In reality, my true sources of inspiration come from a combination of less publicized but more talented street, commercial, vector, pop, minimalistic, and contemporary Japanese artists.

Theme & Process

For my theme/ subject I chose my girlfriend and almost immediately regretted doing so because it created more work for me than the assignment required (faces are hard to work with). I took screenshots of my girlfriend while video-chatting with her over the course of a week to use as source/reference material. Sketches were done by hand and on Adobe Illustrator with the help of a Wacom tablet. I liked some of the variations I had more than the 4 pieces I ultimately ended up with, but didn’t use them due to a number of constraints (ie. time, medium, color, impossible to cut out).

Movement

For my movement piece, as with all my pieces, I wanted my girlfriend to be the focal point. The lines and shapes are meant to create a sense of movement by directing the viewer’s attention from the focal point to the bottom left, around to the right, and slowly back to the focal point again.

I remember someone commenting that the use of shapes to create movement was too obvious/easy/boring and half agree. My intention was to create movement in a way similar to the rising sun used in contemporary Japanese pop art and street art. I didn’t want to use the rising sun itself though because it’s overdone and kinda boring. I tried to make it more interesting but still simple by using fragmented triangles and shapes instead.

I also remember someone commenting that the piece would be more interesting and have a greater sense of direction if I varied the line thicknesses of the shapes. This is something I actually experimented with and thought about doing. I agree and knew that it would have made for a more interesting piece but ultimately decided against it to preserve consistency and save myself some work

Repetition

This one was a b’tch to cut out. Repetition is used to create a sense of layering/depth that is otherwise pretty hard to create in faces when limited to only 1 color. Out of my 4 pieces, this is probably the one that is most reminiscent of Fairey’s work. But that’s only because it’s stencil-like, and Fairey works with stencils. I would have loved to cut this out of waxed paper to use as a stencil with spray paint instead but again was not able to do given the constraints of the assignment. The circles to the bottom left of the face are meant to represent spray paint tests. They work in the composition to create balance, and contrast with the horizontal lines and harder edges used in the face.

Balance

My most abstract out of my not-so-abstract pieces. This is a frontal shot of my girlfriend’s face framed by her hand (both cut out with hard edges), and some shapes open to interpretation (birthday hat anyone?). Circles make another appearance in this piece accompanied by lines to create depth.

Emphasis & Economy

In a world where everything is overly cluttered and more complicated than it has to be, I value simplicity, visibility, and well thought out clean designs much more than detail and depth. I tried to communicate that as clearly as I could by placing a simple design dead center of the composition with no background. I knew Sherin and a lot of other people wouldn’t like it because it goes against what we’ve been learning in class, but I did it anyway <3