Extended Blind Contour

Reflection

Grandmother is a piece that was based on three blind contours I made. Blind contours are made by drawing an object without looking at what you are drawing, and without lifting your pen from the page. For these three, I drew my face (in a mirror), my hand, and my foot. While I was creating the work, I found that the face looked a lot more like my past grandmother's face. I was surprised that in drawing myself, I had ended up drawing her. This is how the piece got its name. If she were here, I would have wanted her to see how much I have grown. This piece feels like it shows that. The colors are crazy, the design is a little bit everywhere, but in some ways, it shows that the experimental part of me has grown. The piece does not have a lot of structure to it, which is purposeful. I started with so much room to explore, that I just kept experimenting until the very end of it. There is a lot that I could change, but also nothing that I want to change. It feels complete in all of its wildness. While the piece may not actually resemble who my grandmother was on the outside, it may show a little piece that we shared.

There were so many materials used in the piece, I may not even remember them all. To start with, I used watercolor paper, and eventually (near the end) I used watercolor painted. But I started the piece with a black sharpie, that then spread into colorful sharpies and blick markers. I added colored pencil and colored pens in places too. Eventually, I used oil pastel in the bottom right-hand area. A tiny bit of graphite was used as well. Just for sketching a design, I didn't end up doing. I used a watercolor marker as my last medium, to fill in any extra white spaces. These are the light blue areas that can be seen.

When I began this piece, I did not have a plan at all. I just wanted to experiment with color and space. I was inspired by another FHS artist and the lines that she uses in her work, so I started to try and do something similar, but it didn't feel natural to me. I wanted my work to be organic, and not be that close to anyone else's, so I just started to move my marker however it wanted to move over the page. I started grouping colors, with yellow and purple being right next to each other, and the oranges and marigold yellows being in one area. I was worried that there was no form to it and this helped to add a little bit of order. The whole piece has an element of crazy, and I intended that this crazy comes across as a purposeful crazy, and not just as random lines and colors. Not everything in creating this went smoothly either. I got a little stuck when I added the watercolor. I didn't know what to do with it after that, but I found that stepping away from it for a little bit, and then coming back helped. I still didn't know what to do, yet I knew a little bit more about what not to do. I was also interested by the fact that I found a few of the lines in the piece are similar to the lines that I have in a personal project I've been working on. I was intrigued to see that this was carrying over into other works unintentionally. Overall, this piece was very fun to create and learn with.