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.