Relief Portrait

For this project the goal was to chose a person to do a portrait of and create a relief using materials that connected to the person. I chose to create Donald Trump out of pads and tampons. I thought it would be funny because he has expressed how much he (doesn’t) support women’s rights.

To begin I use foam cord to create a background by sticking liners horizontally. I then attempted to make his face cutting out his features from pads. Originally I had stuck liners on as his skin tone. When I stuck his features on it didn’t look like him. I tried to use the orange wrappers to create his hair but I didn’t give them enough texture. I used the orange pads to create his hand, but it was too small (which I guess makes sense if you think about it). And I had his hand holding a tampon as a microphone. I stuck tampon applicator around the sides along with zig zag patterned wrappers to add color to my piece. I also used a speech bubble to put a quote he said about Megan Kelley and how she was bleeding from her “wherever”. It is no secret Donald Trump is an avid tweeter who says ridiculous, sexist, racist, homophonic, xenophobic, etc., things. I wanted to play off of that. I ended up originally turning in a piece I was not happy with and my classmates gave me a lot of feedback to make it look more like Donald Trump. I also had centered my entire piece which didn't make it interesting to look at. After receiving this feedback and talk to Ms. Medsker I started completely over. I blew up a picture of his face and printed it. I then used the back of the orange pad wrappers which were a duller orange than the front of the pad wrappers I used for his hair. I cut out his eyes from the wrappers in different tone and built up his nose. For his hair I crinkled the wrappers to create more texture because he is known for having very weird hair. Attaching material to the picture made i much much easier to make it look like him. Of course I knew with the material I was working with it wouldn’t look exactly like him. I stuck the liners on the background like before and put tampons around the border. I put him to the right said and attached the quote above his head to create an interesting composition.

Overall I am happy with the changes I made. If I were to change anything I would do something to activate the white space. Since his face and quote take up most of the piece I found it hard to do. Plus there’s patterns on the wrappers so the piece is very busy. Maybe I would do a solid color background.