Portrait Relief

The objective of this project was to create a portrait, a 3D one, of ourself or someone that we know. It had to be 3D, as I mentioned before, and for my project I decided to try something new with a material that I didn't really think was traditionally sculpture material. We were also encouraged to use a material that could reflect the person/thing that was the subject of our piece.

This project was a little harder then some others that I have done. To do it, I first drew an outline of my sister's face on a cork board so I would know where to place the nails. I used one of her senior pictures as a reference and posterized it. Then I stuck all of the nails into the cork board. After that, I used three different shades of embroidery thread to add value to the piece and to make more color to make it look more realistic. After I completed her face, which was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be, I realized I had quite a bit of border space. To cover up the border space, I used ticket stubs and layered them over each other to get rid of the blank border, bring out the white in the face, and create and abstract-looking border that made it look more 3D.

My inspiration from this project came from my sister, Claudia. I chose someone who I spend a lot of time with an who I bond with often, so I wanted to dedicate an art project after her. I chose the thread and nails material because like nails, she is sometimes sharp with me and hard to get along with, but the thread bonds us together and she is also a complicated person. I added the ticket stubs because movies and the movie theater are things that I relate with her, and I thought it was a cute touch to add all of the stubs we collected from movies that we had seen over the years together.