Third Drawing Critique (Drawing III 2)

I am so pleased with how this critique went! It started off really funny because someone said that it looked like tasty taffy. Then people started saying some really good comments about it. They really liked the title, "Just Keep Swimming" because it was from the movie Finding Nemo and because it went with the story behind the piece and explained it really well. They said that they really liked the colors and how they blended together with the mark making. Someone else said that it looked wet and that it really looked like you were in the water and it gave that feeling of being expressive and being able to move through the water. Going along with the title, they said that they liked how there was multiple pictures as opposed to one large picture because it gave the feeling of repetitiveness and swimming over and over again everyday, but not necessarily doing the same thing every time you swim which as I said earlier was exactly what I wanted to convey. These were all really encouraging comments to hear because I wasn't completely sure of how accurately I accomplished this. Then a lot of people started to ask questions about my experience in synchronized swimming and how to do it. They were really interested in it and I am really glad that these pieces brought up this discussion. Because of the fact that it gave the feeling of repetitiveness, they suggested that it would be cool to have a very large amount of these and put them all over the wall in a grouping instead of only having the five that I put up in a row. They liked how I displayed the ones that I did, but they said that I should make more of them and display them in that way. I am so happy with this critique.

Third Drawing (Drawing III 2)

For this drawing we were instructed to create a drawing that had to do with the idea of place. During class, in order to come up with ideas to use for this piece, we created a thought web chart so that we were able to visually see our thoughts on this subject matter. When we were creating this chart, we were instructed to not think about what we were putting down, but just put the first thought that came to our mind when we thought about place, and then feed off of those ideas. As I looked over the chart that I created, I notice that there was a recurring theme of nostalgia that was involved in everything that I thought of when it came to place. Everything that I thought of that had to do with place made me think of different memories that I had experienced that had to do with the specific places that I thought of. I also was forced to think about what places were important to me. When I thought about this, I realized that the more time I spent in a certain place, the more meaningful it was to me. Because of this, someone asked me what the most meaningful place to me was and I told them that my home was the most meaningful place to me because I have spent the most time there. I have lived in the same city in the same house for my entire life so I have many good and not so good memories from there. They then asked me to be more specific about what my favorite place at home is to me, and after thinking about it, I realized that the most meaningful place was the pool. The pool is one of my favorite places to be. I have always loved to be in the water ever since I was a very little kid. Whenever I am in the pool I always get this sense of happiness, as strange as that sounds. During high school I was on the synchronized swimming team. This had a major impact on my life, and was the most memorable experience for me throughout my life at home. So I decided to include this in my piece. I wasn't sure how to show this through a drawing because I figured that drawing a synchronized swimmer would be way too cliche. So after looking through some images, I found one that used ink to show the feeling of being in the water. I decided to play around with this idea and experiment with using ink and water to express the emotion of swimming in the pool. When I thought about the feeling that I get in the pool that I would need to convey with this drawing, I realized that I need to convey the happiness, and the feeling of being very free and being able to just flow threw the water. I did not know which type of ink to use at first, but after lots of experimentation I discovered that acrylic paint gave the effect that I wanted for this piece. In my opinion, it is such an amazing feeling to be in the water. In order to create this, I used water to let the ink go wherever the water wanted it to because that would create the feeling of freeness that you get when you are in the pool. I also used cool colors because it is a very cool feeling to be surrounded by the water. It is so refreshing. And I tried not to use too many brushstrokes with this piece, because that would take away from the feeling of being able to do whatever you want to do and not having any confines. And if I did use any brushstrokes I tried to keep them very loose in order to give it that expressive nature. I decided to do a triptych with this piece because only having one small drawing was not enough to express this feeling. You have a new and different experience every time you get in the water, so I figured that doing multiple pictures would accurately express this. That being said, many different people have different opinions on what they feel when they are in the water. Some absolutely love it, and some are scared by it, and some just don't like it at all. So this piece is just what it means to me to be in the water, and for other people it could be something else that they just absolutely love to do. I think that these drawings accurately express what I wanted them too. It took a lot of trials in order to come up with them, but overall I am pretty pleased with the final product.

Third Drawing (Drawing III 2)

This drawing has to do with the idea of place. During class, in order to come up with an idea for this piece, we created a thought web chart so that we could visually see our thoughts on this subject matter. When we were creating this chart, we were instructed to not think about what we were putting down, but just put the first thought that comes to our mind, and then feed off of those ideas. As I looked over the chart that I created, I notice that there was a recurring theme of nostalgia involved in everything that I thought of. Because of this, someone asked me what the most meaningful place was and I told them that my home was the most meaningful place to me because I have spent the most time there. I have lived in the same city in the same house for my entire life. They then asked me to be more specific about what my favorite place at home is to be, and after thinking about it, I realized that it was the pool. I have always loved to be in the water ever since I was a very little kid. During high school I was on the synchronized swimming team. This had a major impact on my life, and was the most memorable experience for me throughout my life at home. So I decided to include this in my piece. I wasn't sure how to show this through a drawing because I figured that drawing a synchronized swimmer would be way too cliche. So after looking through some images, I found one that used ink to show the feeling of being in the water. I decided to play around with this idea and experiment with using ink and water to express the emotion of swimming in the pool. We will see how this turns out!

Second Project Critique (Drawing III 2)

For the critique on my second drawing, I felt that that one went very well as well. I worked very hard on this drawing, and I got some good compliments on it, and it was very nice to hear those since I put so much effort into it, and I also got some more constructive criticism on this piece as well. They really liked the drawing as a whole, and they considered it to be a mural art. This took me by surprise because that was not necessarily my intention, but I liked the idea of making a mural that makes a very big and bold statement. They said that this piece definitely expressed the meaning and viewpoint behind it, so making a mural of it made a lot of sense. They talked about how it was a bit of a cross between realism and abstract, which was read as being somewhat confusing, so I am either going to try and render it more to be more realistic like Sam Durant’s work, or take away some of the rendering I have already done to make it more cartoony. They compared it to Frida Khalo’s work. I can definitely see how that is the case and it can be confusing because as I was working on the drawing I was still undecided as to whether or not I wanted it to be realistic, and I was leaning more towards realistic, but I was not finished with the rendering yet, so I think I’m going to go back and finish that. Nothing was said about the background, but I suppose that is a good thing because it is not meant to be a prominent part of the piece so it was not mean to be that noticeable. They said that everything else looked good though so for the most part I am pleased with this piece. I think all of my hard work really helped.

Second Project (Drawing III 2)

For this project, we were instructed to create a drawing that includes the theme of protesting specifically relating to the protests that are currently happening in Madison on the bill that governor Walker is attempting to pass. Originally, I wanted this drawing to reflect my views on this issue and have the drawing be able to clearly convey them, but after starting the drawing, I quickly realized that I did not really know exactly what my views on this issue were. I didn’t really know enough about what all was included in the bill and what it was actually about to form an educated opinion on it and to decide if I supported it or not. So I tried to come up with a drawing that would be fairly neutral in order to remain unbiased about the bill since I didn’t really understand it and instead convey exactly what it is that is happening in this situation as a result of the bill and depict a protest in an impartial way.

In class, we learned about Sam Durant’s work. In his work, he takes photographs from protests and recreates them by drawing them photo realistically. When I heard about him I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to do as well. The reason that I wanted to do this is because I have always loved using photographs and drawing them realistically. I like it so much because of the fact that I find that it is a really good challenge for me. I also thought that this would be a good way to remain neutral and to just convey the situation that is occurring instead of picking a side on the issue. It was hard to find a picture that I wanted to use to do this because I wanted to try and find a close up picture of a face of a protestor at a rally and recreate that, but I did not find any pictures that were close up. I found a couple of options that I thought would work and picked the best.

The reason why I picked this picture was because I saw the look on the faces of the children in the picture and they looked so sad. It really captured my attention to see this because the emotion that the kids gave really explained exactly how people who were protesting were really feeling about this bill, so I thought that that would be a good way to depict exactly what is happening in this situation. Also, the fact that there are kids protesting about this bill in general means that it really does affect everyone so that really stuck me as surprising to see that.

Although I had a lot of fun and really enjoyed doing it, it was a very long and hard process to draw this image. It was a bigger scale than I had ever done before so it took a long time in order to get everything rendered and I ran out of time to finish it, but I think it works to not have everything be completely rendered. It was not what I was going for necessarily, but gives it more of a feel of bring a mural, and I really like the idea of having it represent a mural that actually has a strong meaning behind it. I am going to try and go back and make it all uniform though by either undoing some of the rendering that I did already or by finishing the rendering of the things that I haven’t rendered yet. I am leaning more towards finishing the rendering because I really enjoy doing that and that was my original plan.

Overall, though, I am very happy about how this drawing turned out. I worked very hard on it and spent a lot of time on it, and I think it paid off. I really enjoy the size of it and I enjoy how it was drawn and the fact that there is such a great meaning behind it. It is a good memory of what happened at this point in my life because this situation could potentially impact me for the rest of my life.