Material-Based Portrait

The main idea that guided this artwork is the prompt I was given and how I choose to interpret it. We were told to create a portrait of a person important to us out of a material that represented them. I chose to do a self portrait mostly because I was the easiest person to choose a material for. I was inspired to make a collage out of cut out magazine pieces because I owned (and still have) a giant stack of magazines when I was little. This is because when I was little and still living in Germany, whenever I went with my parents to the grocery store I got to pick out a magazine at the checkout line. Without a doubt I almost always grabbed a Filly Pferde magazine, it came with a little horse action figure and comics about it inside. All this to say magazines are special to me and that is why I choose it as the material for this portrait. I was also inspired by many different pieces of collage art. 

I found a stack of magazines to be used as materials in the art room and spent an entire work period cutting out interesting things that I thought could create myself, my dress, and the background. Particular, I was looking for body parts I would put together to make my upper half, blue and cool tones to make my dress, and warm tones to make the background. I went back to the cut outs later and cleaned up the edges with better scissors. Then I arranged all the cutouts on a table to figure out the composition and how I would glue everything together. Finally I used a glue stick to put everything together on a thick piece of paper. 

When figuring out the composition of this piece by laying out the cut outs on the table I realized the piece needed more to it. I went back to the magazines and got a few more pieces to fill up the background and complete the dress. Something that is natebel from the image I course to replicate of myself is that the tones of the colors are inverted. In the original image the background is an ocean and clear sky and everything is very cool toned. This makes my orange dress stand out a lot against the background, which is why I chose it for the photo. In the artwork I chose to invert the tones in the image because I wanted to see how blue on orange looked. I also changed the theme of the background from an ocean to a forest setting.