Designing Abstraction

Artist Statement

This piece was based off of a thumbnail sketch from our design matrix, where we combined the elements of art and principles of design. The sketch I chose as an inspiration incorporated value and variety, however I ended up altering the subject from my original sketch significantly. As I was further planning and sketching my ideas for this piece, I sketched the head with the elongated nose, and from there decided I wanted to play with proportion and angles. Using the negative space the first head created, I sketched in the rest, and chose to draw the last head upside down just to make it more intriguing. I wanted to express how each head relies on another head to take its form and make it stand out and on alone. I also intentionally over exaggerated the ears and noses of each face, because I find myself that certain features of our face we either like to hide or are in general not dramatically proposed as the main feature of our faces.

For this piece I almost entirely used a fine tip black pen and a black marker. Since I wanted to create enough of a change in value, I ended up having to both layer the fine tip pen and fill in some white spaces with a marker. Additionally, as I was completing the last bit of this piece my pen ran out and unfortunately I did not have a replacement, making the color and thickness of the line slightly different than the rest of the piece. At first I was unsure of what material to use and also what technique as the scale of the piece is fairly big, so in the end I chose the fine point pen. This allowed me to layer the ink for value and texture, but also create contrast between the highlights on the face.

This piece evolved quite a bit from the original thumbnail sketch I had done. The original sketch incorporated more abstract shapes, and I felt like there was a lack in unity of the shapes. After some sketching I decided I wanted to use faces as the subject of my piece, still sticking with the original ideas of my thumbnail sketch. The ideas in my sketch were to have several different forms and shapes that stretch over the majority of the page horizontally. Each shape alternated by fading from the darkest value to the lightest, so as to create emphasis without creating harsh and unnatural borders. Once I had my basic ideas down, I started sketching on my big and final draft paper to get an idea of the proportions of each head. I tried to balance each head by having either the ear or the nose being of a larger scale than the rest. Overall, I am very pleased with how this piece came out, especially since I got to experiment with cross hatching and creating value by a different means than I have before on such a large scale.