Portrait experimentations - pencil, prismacolor pencil and paints

I created this portrait using Prismacolor pencils. This took me around 2 hours to do.  I am not overly pleased with the outcome of this portrait. This reason being because I found it difficult to give the face a smooth appearance, as you are able to see the lines from the different shades of colour in the portrait. I think this was my fault, as I should of focused on doing one small section of the face at a time. Also, because this is a large scale portrait (A4) I found it hard to add much detail. If I was to do another Prismacolor pencil portrait, I would consider creating the portrait at a smaller scale.  

I completed this small drawing of part of my brothers face in around 20 minutes, using Prismacolor pencils. when doing this I found that it is easier to add details and more accuracy in smaller scale portraits than large ones.

I completed this drawing of my brothers eyes in around 30 minutes.

This is a portrait I did of my little brother only using pencil and an eraser. this took me around 3 and a half hours to complete. Whilst doing this drawing, I found it very easy to add depth and tone into the portrait, as well as shadows, depending on how much pressure I put down onto the pencil. To add the highlights around the nose and on the forehead, I used an eraser and then slightly blended the blank space into the pencil slightly, to make it look more natural and realistic. I found this to look really effective, and noticed it made the portrait instantly look more three dimensional. I found this a lot easier to complete compared to using the Prismacolor pencils, as a result of the normal pencils being very easy to blend, and I am also able to only use a couple of pencils, where as with the coloured pencils I had to use a lot of different shades of pencil, and had to be more precise on where I put the colours, to make sure it looked correct. With the pencil portrait I was able to correct it with the eraser if a mistake was to happen, however I was unable to erase the mistakes I made when doing the Prismacolor pencil portrait.

This is a portrait I completed of my Grandad, using Prismacolor pencils. Due to me finding it difficult to add details and accuracy in a large scale portrait using these pencils, I decided to create this portrait at a slightly smaller scale. I took my own advice from the last portrait I did using these pencils, and focused more on one area at a time.

I also did this portrait of my mum at a smaller scale (just under the size of A4), and as a result of her skin colour being a lot lighter than my granddads, I found it a lot more difficult to find and use the correct skin tone colour pencils, and found it hard to find pencil colours which are in the same shade range, to highlight and contour the face.  

I drew and coloured this portrait using prismacolour pencils. I was really happy with how this turned out, for the flowers I used acrylic paints and found them really easy to use and i was impressed with how vibrant the flowers turned out to be. This has made me want to use and experiment more with acrylic paints.

I created this small scale eye and nose portrait of my little brother using acrylic paints. I found it really easy to find the right skin tones to use, and enjoyed how I was able to layer many shades, shadow and highlights once each layer had dried. This took me around 15- 20 minutes to complete. 

MARIA RIVANS - Artist Research

Maria Rivans is mainly known for her scrapbook-style collage art pieces. In her pieces, she mixes pop art with surrealism, and they are also very imaginative and fantastical. I have found the colours she uses in her work are quite muted and every detail in her work is very intricate.

When I first came across Maria Rivans' work, I got the impression that her work was based on different cultures and individuals identities. Such as, one of her pieces or art above, when i first had a look at this painting, I thought it represented the woman in the image, and that the objects and things around her described her as a person, such as her culture, where she is from and her interests.

This is a portrait of my brother, that I created in the style of Maria Rivans. I was initially inspired by the meaning which I thought was behind her work, and not the real actual meaning behind it. I chose a photo of my brother, where the angle was similar to the portraits Rivans uses in her work. I thought of all of my brothers favourite things he likes to do and his favourite toys, which is very personal and expresses part of his identity.

MARCELO MONREAL - Artist Research

Marcelo Monreal is a Brazilian collage  artist,  known for his different take on inner beauty. In his pieces of work, he digitally cut open portraits of celebrities, supermodels and other faces, showing beautiful flowers blooming underneath. When creating a piece of his artwork, he has to make sure that in the portrait there is a correct place and correct angle he is able to cut out sections. This is because every face is unique, meaning the cut outs on certain portraits can either turn out good or bad. One of the key meanings behind his pieces of work, and the reason why he includes flowers in his work is because he feels like the cut outs make the people become ‘vulnerable’ to opening up, and the flowers show the beauty that they are shielding with their appearance.

When looking at Marcelo Monreal’s artwork, I really notice the vibrant colours of the flowers, which may represent the true colours and personality of the person in the portrait. In a few of Monreal’s pieces of work, the portrait is in black and white, however he has left the flowers with the vibrant colours. I find that this looks really effective, as it shows that even though the person in the portrait may seem dual and closed off on the outside, on the inside they are blooming, bright and full of life. This leaves me the impression that you should not ‘read a book by its cover’.

He focused this piece of his work on a portrait on Kendall Jenner, an American model who is also known as one of the Kardashians. This piece depicts Jenner in a black and white portrait, the explosion of vibrant flowers coming from the fragmented sections adds amazing contrast.
  The vibrant colours from the flowers give life to the portrait, and also indicates that she is a beautiful person on the inside as well as the outside. All the of the fully bloomed flowers give me the impression that Kendall Jenner is full of life and her life is blooming (like the flowers).

Monreal has inspired me to work on cutting out portraits and involve flowers into my work, however I will be working with a different materials and techniques and my work will have a completely different meaning behind it. I will be focusing on the flowers as well as the person, instead of the flowers representing them in a way of expressing them and their personality. The flowers will represent growth and decay, linking to the person in the portrait and what stage of life they are at, and also slightly representing their brightness and true colours.

PROPOSAL

SECTION 1

Throughout this project, I have been interested in experimenting and improving my skills of collaging, as well as drawing or painting portraits. My starting point of this project was researching into different artists that inspire me and give me ideas. I’ve been inspired and influenced by several artists, three of these being Marcelo Monreal, Magdiel Lopez and Adam Hale. Marcelo Monreal makes deconstructed and digital collages, where he manipulates the faces of contemporary icons and fashion models, and fills them out with lots of flowers. Monreal was the artist that inspired me to experiment with collaging. All of his work is created digitally through Photoshop, however to make the work my own I want to create pieces using different materials and techniques, however I also want to experiment doing my work digitally as I never usually do my work digitally, especially portraits. Magdiel Lopez creates posters, which have a unique style, he uses bright neon colours, photography and he includes a lot of fragmentation in his work, his work is similar to Marcelo Monreal’s, in the way he cuts out sections of faces, but is different as his work is a lot more vibrant and not as ‘pretty’ as Monreal’s. Adam Hale is a collage artist, who uses newspapers and magazines which are left behind by fellow commuters on the London tube to create a new collage. All of Hale’s work looks like it is done digitally, but all of his work is in fact done by hand. A lot of his work includes fragmentation and many different compositions. These specific artists have influenced me and gave me the ideas of adding fragments into my work and to experiment with collaging and a variety of compositions.

SECTION 2

The title for this project is going be Growth and Decay. I am going to be working on producing portraits of a few of my family members and fragmenting the portraits in different ways. I will be experimenting in the way that I lay out the composition and the materials and techniques that I use. After researching the artists, I have found out that when fragmenting the portraits, it is important to make sure the face is facing a certain way to get the most realistic and effective outcome. This all relates to my own practice as I rarely draw/paint portraits, so this in itself will be something I get to extend my knowledge on. I also want to experiment in trying to fragment the portraits digitally on my iPad, which I have been inspired to do by Marcelo Monreal. To extend my creative ability, I am also going to layer and create different levels in my work to make it look three dimensional and to give it more structure.

SECTION 3

As a result of the college closure due to the corona virus, it has meant that I am having to improve on my time management skills. To do so, I have been noting down every week what I want to achieve and my goals to keep myself on track. Due to there being no lessons now, Zoom calls with my teachers and art class has also kept me on track and motivated with what I am doing. Throughout this project, I’m going to experiment and venture out into a variety of different materials and techniques and push myself out of my comfort zone. I never work with coloured pencils, so I will be experimenting with those, I am experienced in using acrylic paints, however not for portraits, so I will try using those too. When using acrylic paint, i have found that it doesn’t take long for me to create something when using them, therefore I know that it wouldn’t be very time consuming when creating a piece of artwork. For doing digital work on my iPad, I will look for an app which does what I’m looking for, and then I will follow tutorials on YouTube and learn how to do this, so I have an understanding on how to do it in my own work.

SECTION 4

Critically analysing my work thus far, I have been working and experimenting with a wide variety of materials and techniques, these being: Prismacolor pencils, gouache paints, pencil and acrylic paint. With each of these I have experimented doing portraits, to figure out which works best for me to use. I have found so far that I work best with acrylic paint, as a result of being able to layer as well as blend the paints with ease. With paints I am also able to mix and get the most accurate colours and shades of paint that I need, which was very important to me when getting the correct colours for the skin tones.