This project secretly branches off from another final project I did during my senior year for my drawing and painting class before graduation. It sort of plays as a sequel to it. Surprisingly, the process for this was a lot less messier than my desk while completing my pieces for the X project, not to mention I worked on this on the floor of my bedroom because my desk didn’t have enough room for the canvas.
The materials used for this consisted of mainly office supplies, like sticky notes, sticky tabs, notebook paper, binder dividers, index cards, pencils, and old, dried out pens. Other materials include graph paper, tracing paper, and snippets of my geometry homework from my sophomore year in high school. When laid out flat on a desk, many elements and layers of the papers on top of each other begin to rise from the canvas, making it feel and look like a portion of an office desk belonging to a very disgruntled employee.
These are 3 collage pieces made from washi tape, origami paper, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, some magazine pages, lace trims, and posca pens for some minor details.
My inspiration for the first piece, consisting of red and purple hues for the analogous color goal, came quite instantaneously where I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do but didn’t know what to use until I was looking through a wedding magazine that had so many hues, tints, and shades of my desired colors and decided to make it visually inspired from weddings.
The second piece is a little more abstract, as I thought more about the colors than what tangible thing I’m taking inspiration from. Given that my complimentary colors were blue and orange, the end result made me think of direct opposites like fire and water. As a random fact, the feminine figure that’s present in the X is part of an illustration seen for a wine company, and she is only known as ‘The Immigrant.’ The added origami butterflies were later added shortly after I learned that fact.
The third and final piece is actually dedicated to and heavily inspired from a video game character that I may or may not have had a fixation on years ago. Because their design consists of 3 colors, I decided to base my triadic piece off of his colors, being red, blue and a lime green. This piece was the most fun for me to do.
Overall, this project was my favorite. But it also left my desk in shambles.
The image at the top is the final draft of my zine before it is printed on a sheet of copy paper and folded into a small book, as depicted in the second two images below the first. This zine is no bigger than the size of my hand, and as the numbers suggest on the back of the zine, it is the 18th copy out of the 20 produced in total.
All images used in that zine were all personally taken by me. They ranged from simple objects or furniture found around my house, to hues of red I found while outside of my home. Looking back at this makes me wish I could’ve added more to make it better, but I am proud of it for being my first ever attempt at making a zine.
These are two pieces made from what started out as simple black and white sheets of paper. I cut the designs and patterns out with an x-acto knife and glued them down on the white sheet of paper into the artworks displayed. The first image is based on a viral music video for a song titled ‘Bad Apple’ and the second image is based on an album cover for ‘Kikuo Miku 7.’
To put it bluntly, I didn’t quite grasp the goal of the assignment in the first attempt, but while drafting the thumbnail sketch for the second piece, it became much more clear to me. It was still fun cutting out the patterns in more intricate designs, as I am a very detail-oriented person.
Terracotta Prismacolor pencils on toned paper, 9 x 12 in.
For my sequential narrative, I showcased my hero as a small humanoid that works as a personal housekeeper where she resides, without being seen by the owner themself. Throughout the story, she misplaces objects in a manner she believes looks better, and hides in places where someone would never look.
The hero’s attributes stem from my personal habits in organization, as well as often rearranging objects on my shelves to what I see fit better until I feel like it doesn’t look good anymore, usually a week after rearranging stuff.
Sepia-toned prismacolor pencils, watercolor pencils, Croquil pen and ink.
All three of my drawings are of different places in my own home. Both my sepia and watercolor drawings show my bedroom in different angles, while my pen and ink piece is a view of my living room couch from behind.
For my sepia-toned piece, I went with a cleaner and more refined approach for the context of my sequential narrative, where at one point in the story, everything was supposed to be clean. I had previously used watercolor pencils in the past but never came to warm up to them, so my watercolor piece was mostly done from what I knew best about the use of the materials as well as some experimentation. My ink piece was executed in a rather messy manner, but for the reason that the back of the couch was supposed to be shown in a way where it hadn’t been cleaned or looked at for some time.
I decided to alter a knock-knock joke book for this project. Because the book was paperback and was very small in size, I decided to make a cardboard diorama that when fully closed, shows two trapdoors, and when opened, shows a “maze” full of white doors that can be opened with a page inside that tells a knock-knock joke.
The only things I could cut out from the book itself were the pages telling the joke, while everything else was constructed with cardboard and painted over with acrylics. I did my best to recreate the colors used on the book cover for the entire diorama, while the doors were painted white to put more emphasis on the whole theme of doors.
For the compassion project, I wanted specifically non-artists to show more compassion towards artists as a whole. I focused on the skyrocketing use of AI generated images and how its practices in stealing hundreds of thousands of artworks for samples in generating images have been putting artists out of their jobs, and give the false illusion that everyone can be an artist by typing words onto a screen. AI in recent times has also slipped into writing, photography, acting (both voice and live actors), as well as music, however, I wanted my posters to showcase the effects on traditional and digital artists specifically to narrow the topic.
The first poster shows a bust portrait of a person being “torn,” and the photos used to fill in the strips are specifically photos taken of nature and people. My intention for this was my belief in that nature inspires art: the earliest pieces of art in humanity were of animals, trees, and people doing their everyday routines. Therefore, the bust portrait is having their inspiration “ripped” from them by AI.
The second poster is of a head viewed from the side having the back of their head “shredded,” and the torn pieces dispersing across the page are from a photo of a woman watering her plants. I personally had the plants in mind to represent creative thoughts and ideas, and the woman being the person itself, tending to those ideas until they are consequently shredded and picked up by the robotic arms surrounding the back of the person’s head.
For both backgrounds, I laid out a single colored wash of watercolor for simplification and I felt that if I used any photos for the background, it would make the whole piece too busy. For me, gluing the pieces of torn and cut up photos was rather a hassle, and coming up with ideas for this project was rather difficult for me, but in the end, I went with a more simplified approach that can be understood by a person that doesn’t dabble into art often. It worked out in the end though, for everyone that saw these posters got the idea right away.
