Maria (with sand!)

I'm almost done with the face but I felt that the yellow I was doing was making the colors dull so now I am waiting to get banana yellow to finish that up.

I added sand to make the bricks look cooler. and it does.

Raissa (updated)

pencil->pen->crayons






close-up














to give you an idea of the size.

Genesis

I think it looks better irl.

Kiara

in process...










ummmmmm yeah it still needs work.

Maria

SO it has been named, and I am continuing to work on it, I am planning to put bricks on the background

Raissa

HEYYY

so I am really excited about this piece. It is on brown paper, I laid out the face with pencil and I already started with pen but I want to finish with pen and ad crayon. It is pretty big too, I don't have it measured but the face is bigger than six inches or something, probably more.

Ludlam's Criteria

For AP Students:
ü what did you find most challenging?
ü what are you most proud of?
ü talk about process: where did you start? how did your ideas change and evolve?
ü what did you learn? about yourself, about the process?
ü perspective: do you think it’s successful? what issues did you have with it? do you think you created a believable sense of space?
ü Please comment on how this piece relates to your theme.

Reviewers:
ü first reactions: what stands out the most?
ü what do you think is the strongest part of the image? why?
ü what are the artist’s symbols communicating to you?
ü how does their choice of medium add or detract from their final image?
ü could anything have been pushed further?
ü did the artist put emphasis on any part of their composition?
ü perspective: what’s working? what’s not? be critical; look hard. does it make sense in space?
ü what is the point of view?
ü is the composition unified? why? why not?

vocabulary to think about:
ü space
ü color (if applicable)
ü form
ü rhythm
ü emphasis
ü unity

untitled

This is unfinished as well.

detail of the girls face.

The Feast.... has been scrapped!

...all that remains are a few lonely cakes.

Concentration Essay

When I started the concentration I knew that all I really want to do is a series of portraits of the kids that I met during my summer job, at the Esperanza School of Hope. I was absolutely confounded by the resilience of youth, the girls were all innocent and cheerful, but each had their own troubled stories. I would have liked to learn everything about these girls, learn their stories better, but I could not. I love portraits because they give me a chance to discover the subtle hints in their countenance, but for whatever reason in these portraits I felt compelled to tell a story. I thought of it as an opportunity for me to get to know the girls and imbue onto them my hopes for their lives. However, when I started on Raissa's portrait, I realized that it was not appropriate for me to give them a charge that is not theirs. Raissa was one of my favorite girls there, and while still, I did not know much about her life, I knew that she was very important to me and I could not bring myself to put something on her that wasnt hers. That is when I decided that the portraits needed to be more about the girl and less about the girls life. While they each have their own stories I'm sure, I now realize that it is oppressive to try and do anything else beside portray a girl.
I would like my drawings to be about childhood. I just want to show the incredible resilience of children. At first glance I want my portraits to be the epitome of happy childhood but I also want to tell the kid’s stories, actual stories, or ones I dream up for them. I will do this by exploiting composition, background, and negative space and blend the line between what is “hoped” or “imagined’ and what is real. I have pictures of these girls from when I worked with them and I am planning on doing studies of various media resources to adjust body language and such. Most of the pictures I took are from a straight on angle, but I think I will change that with the studies. I want to use creative materials that remind people of childhood. I want to use things like crayons and shoe-laces on top of the normal oil paint and watercolor. While I want my work to vary, I want to have fairly big pieces. The lives of these children are no small thing.

My Fat Lady

To start working on this painting I looked a lot of the work of Jenny Saville.
Jenny Saville often paints large scale paintings of obese women who pretty much fill the canvas. She says it's about creating something that is literally too big for the frame of society and I really like that about her work. I decided to do a painting of my dog, Coco. She is fat so she fit the profile but more than that, the companionship of a dog transcends that same frame of society that Saville indicates. I found the largest canvas I could find and used oil paints. I didn't want the portrait of my black and grey dog to be boring so I used blues, reds and yellows to move the eye.