Portrait relief

This is my portrait relief project. I had to choose a person that I was personally connected to and I had to make a relief of a picture of them. I had to do so with a material that I thought was connected to them. I chose do my project about my dad because he is important to me and inspires me to do well in everything I do. I chose to do a wood carving because he likes wood carving a lot and has made some really impressive sculptures. I carved out his face in a wood block and I used a wood burner to burn in the word dad as well as words that describe him like inspiring and caring. Since it is only one half of my dad's face, most of the words and designs I added are on the left and the carving is on the right side. I like the effect of it only being one half of my dad's face because it employs the effect of negative space.

A composition rule that was used in my piece was informal balance. I say this because the wood carving that is the focal part is on the right side of the piece and is not centered. I also used framing in this project— I created a stippled border with the wood burner. At first, I just planned on doing the carving, but I quickly realized that I needed to add more to the project. I decided to use the wood burner, and initially I didn't know what to create with it. Eventually I decided on creating a border and making words that describe my dad. I'm glad I decided on doing this because I like how it turned out.

The meaning of this project is fairly simple. I wanted to represent my dad, his qualities and his interests in a piece of art and I feel like I accomplished this with my project. This project relates in a few ways to my life. I had no experience with wood carving before so I feel like after doing this I am better connected to my dad. It is also a useful skill for future. Something that bothers me about this project is that I made a few of the words with the wood burner but without the letter stencils so they are pretty messy. If I could go back I would definitely use the letter stencils to make these words. The most challenging part of this project was definitely burning the words in neatly. I am proud of how the carving came out, though. It shows my strengths because I was able to do a carving which I haven't done before and it shows my weaknesses because I wasn't able to use the burner so well.