Extended Blind Contour

Artist Statement

This piece was initiated by several brief blind contour studies of random things including myself, another student, and some random eyes and lips. After completing my blind contours, I found that it looked like the face in the middle was glancing toward the face on the left hand side, which essentially was the inspiration for the rest of the piece. From there, I played on the idea of there being a sort of spotlight shining on the person looking away, and to add contrast I alternated the rays. From there, I decided to use different forms such as circles and more rays to make my composition more interesting.

For this piece, I again stuck with very familiar processes and materials, utilizing only a black pen. I wanted to work on shading and contrast while in general just experimenting.

There was no actual concept behind the majority of this piece, I sort of just dove in once I saw a connection between my individual blind contours and the rest followed. I experimented quite a bit with forms and shading, not really having much of a concept till about half the page was filled. I did end up going back to my work after I believed it was complete and added more dots to the darkest areas to emphasize the shading. Overall, I am super happy with the way this came out as I took my first inspiration and stuck with it, working around any parts of it that I didn't entirely like, and ended up with a piece I can be proud of.