Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Mine: My Pro-choice Collage

  Our second assignment this quarter was to create a collage based on what presidential candidate we were for/against, and illustrate why we were for/against them!
  I chose a more morally-centered argument, but a very important one: Should abortion be illegal or not?
  For me, the answer is no. A very strong no. If a woman is raped, she has every right to abort that fetus. If a woman is forced to bear the child of her rapist, a man who has probably traumatized her for life, it is a much larger crime, as opposed to going against someone's religion. It is not ANY man's right to dictate what a woman can and can't do with her body. I could rant on, but I'm just gonna get to the art part!
  Again, I started out with pink, red, yellow and orange ink-stained paper. The colors of the paper actually inspired the whole concept. Bright colors represent to me the boldness that this issue takes on, and the neon pink especially, represents the power that women must have, and take hold of to keep our bodies out of the hands of old male politicians.
  But the assignment was make a collage! I hadn't made a collage in a while, and I just decided to jump in with whatever I thought of first. What did I think of first?


  I ended up not being able to work the image of a coat hanger into the collage, but I did discretely put a very made-up dragqueen-ish Mitt Romney in the background. I also worked in a good women's rights quote in the background. The symbol that's very prominent is the feminist fist. As I dont label myself a "feminist", I wanted this symbol to represent women in general, whether or not they feel that strongly about their rights.
   I printed out a labeled picture of a woman's reproductive organs, and that's self explanatory. 
   I found a pair of a woman's legs on the back of a magazine in a Project Runway add,and i thought that was just a cool touch to add to the "women are powerful" thing.
  I then drew on little Leopard spots on the fist, because Leopard spots are fabulous and stereotypically "feminine", and I wanted to make the collage a bit more super-femme.
  Over all of this, I glued on the word "Mine" three times. I downloaded the drippy font onto my computer, then made two of the "mine"s a light pink, while leaving one black. The one that was left black is purposely very bold. This was not meant to be a subtle piece.
  The issue of abortion is still a very dark thing though, so with red and black Acrylic paint, I dabbed on the dark, bloody-looking combination in random spots and the edges to create a kind-of burned, maybe spray painted effect. The red also represents all the women who have had to get illegal, and very messy abortions in the past, and have tragically died for it.
 
  Here's the finished product!
   
(A little pink from my phone's weird camera)

Shoe Drawing

  So the first assignment we had this quarter was to draw some shoes! And not just "take one shoe, draw it, you're done". Each student brought in one or more shoes to add to what would become big piles of them!
  We then cut out little view-finders out of blank index cards so we could focus in on the area we wanted to draw. We weren't just told to draw whatever we see; this assignment was about composition, and making shapes and textures work together. When we made a final decision on what our picture would be, we could take pictures with our cellphones, with or without using the viewfinder, to have an image to refer back to if the shoes were moved at all at any point.
  I chose to draw my shoes on a piece of paper that I had stained with red, orange, pink and yellow ink. It was a bit of a challenge to make even the 6B pencil stand out on the super-saturated paper, so once I had finished shading the drawing in with the regular pencils, I decided to add some extra dark values with a dark red and black colored pencil. I have a thing for super thick outlines, so I tried to combine my love for those with trying to make the drawing still look realistic, as opposed to cartoon-y.
  So here's the final product!!
     I'm super happy with this, and the laces were a really fun element to draw and emphasize!

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Welcome!!

Hi People!

   My names Amelia and I'm one of the super lucky Creative Arts students at HTHS. This blog is going to be all about my art experiences and discoveries, so enjoy my journey!