Exploring and Formulating

What I Did:

This week I tried to break out of my comfort zone and explore a few other options that I have with my project along with formulating a plan for where I truly want to go with my project.  Here is the break down of my time spent on this:

4 hours exploring with manipulating pictures and putting faces on objects
3 hours formulating ideas with classmates and alone of what to do and where to take my ideas
1 hour researching different artists related to my artwork
2 hours drawing expressive eyes and mouths

What I Accomplished:

In order to expand my thinking, I tried to get away from drawing for a short time and explore other medium. I started out taking pictures of objects in my house and then manipulating the photos through Photoshop adding eyes and mouths and adding text that goes along with it. I realized after making these pictures, it was not really in the form that I liked and it was not as much fun as drawing the facial expressions. Afterward, I clipped facial features out of magazines and taped them onto objects in my house along with a written-out dialogue of what the object was saying. This was a lot more fun because the objects could then be seen by my other housemates and it made me really excited to see how they would react to them.

After bringing these photos along with my previous drawings into class to talk about our projects, my classmates and I agreed we liked the drawings more. I got a lot of good feedback and suggestions through this talk. One thing that was suggested that I think is a really good idea was to go public with my idea, such as going to Meijer and giving objects there facial expressions and dialogue. I wouldn't think that I would be one to create public art, but I think that this is the best idea for what I want to accomplish for my project. After getting the basics down for my idea, I sat down and took a lot more time to try and figure out why I wanted to do this and how I was going to go about doing this, which is what is explained in my proposal.

From here, I have started to draw eyes and mouths in a very expressive manor and think of objects that I can attach these things to, along with dialogue for what the object would be saying. Certain objects embody certain personalities and I have tried to illustrate these personalities through humor and surprise. 

There are artists that I have looked at who have similar artwork. I keep looking at work by Terry Border, who makes the Bent Objects. I love the way he conveys relationships between different inanimate objects through humor. He really sets up a great scene and photographs the objects in a way that shows a lot of emotion and personality through things like placement of the wire limbs and shadows. The funny thing is, he does not include faces on his objects or dialogue in his work, while my plan is to only use these things. I also looked at artists who make the faces that you can put on trees.

What I Think I Should Do Next:

This weekend, I plan to make more illustrations and then go to a very public place, such as Meijer, as suggested, and attach my facial features and dialogue onto certain objects that I know will be seen by a number of people. Then, I will wait for people to experience these objects and see what their reactions will be. With these results, I will figure out how to improve my project from there.

A new idea using inanimate objects

What I did:

In the second week, I went further with my first idea of documenting my emotions, along with thinking up more project ideas and variables of these ideas. I also spent time researching artists who have worked with ideas similar to what I have come up with. In all, I have completed 10 hours of work composed of:

·      1.5 hours of continuing my emotion documentation, along with trying different styles of drawing (can't figure out how to make them stay rotated)

·      2 hours of thinking up more project ideas and variables

·      3.5 hours of researching artists whose work relates to my ideas through their websites and books. 

·      3 hours drawing examples for my newest project idea.  

What I accomplished/ discovered/ encountered:

Trying a few different styles of drawing was fun and showed me that certain styles can give a different feel for the emotion that I am trying to portray. I had a lot of fun creating characters for my moods for the first few weeks of school and it was nice to be able to get my emotions out in a way other than vocally.

While creating these, however, I came up with another idea that I think would generate better with an audience. Since I was little, I have always attributed emotions to inanimate objects and felt empathy for them when they were ugly or never used. A few days ago, I wondered, if these inanimate objects could talk, what would they say? I thought that it would be fun to illustrate these objects with personalities, giving them facial expressions and writing their dialogue beside them. I came up with a few, but my shower drawing is still my favorite. It got a lot of reactions (good and bad) from people who I showed it to, which is exactly what I wanted.

After thinking about different variables for this project, talking with Juliette, and researching different artists who make inanimate objects come to life, I realized that I should think about alternate ways to communicate my ideas besides drawing, whether it be through photography, solely text, 3D sculptures, or sound where the audience can hear what the object is saying. Here are a few examples from different artists (worth1000.com and bent objects) that express the emotion of certain everyday objects through either manipulating the photograph of it, or creating limbs for the object and positioning it in a way to look like it is a living object with a human personality:

This project could definitely show my quirky personality. And instead of a project where it just displays my personal emotions, this new project would be more for the public and everyone could relate to it. It would be humorous, but some of them (like the shower) would make people feel a little uneasy.

What I think I should do next:

From here, I will take my new project idea and think about different ways and different media that I can use to portray the objects best, and to give it the feel that I really want the audience to see and respond to. I will also try to come up with many more inanimate objects that I can illustrate.

Reflecting on responses

After talking about my ideas with a few classmates and Stephanie, I felt a little better sense of what it is that I am trying to accomplish for my project. It reinforced my thoughts on what is passionate to me, and it also left me with some thoughts that I might not have come up with otherwise.


Stephanie and Kyla both came up with an idea that seemed interesting to me, which was the idea of "what the text says vs. what you see". Stephanie remembered a drawing that I showed in class in which I drew my legs and wrote text that said "I have faces in my knees" beside them. She talked about how she didn't really know how to feel about it, but that is what she liked about it. Thus far, I have been making little illustrations of emotions with certain characters and labeling them with an exact emotion, but after talking in our groups, I definitely will consider using text in my illustrations that doesn't automatically say the emotion that I am trying to display. I think using text that is weird and quirky will get the viewer's imagination going , which will then get emotional reactions going as well. After all, I am a quirky person who likes weird and dark humor, and it would be nice to incorporate that into my artwork even further.

First real week.

This is the beginning where I just stick my toes in the water and explore what it is that really catches my attention and curiosity...

By the end of the end of the summer, I really started looking at artists that I have always been drawn to in my life and tried to figure out just what about their art really struck me and why. I have always loved films by Tim Burton, the way they are geared towards every age group, the slight humor he uses, and his unique style of creepy cool characters. Last week I bought a 430 page book of Tim Burton illustrations and I have not been able to keep my eyes off it. It is basically my favorite possession at the moment. Along with looking at this book, I have also studied artists like Ralph Steadman, Yoshitomo Nara. Besides artists, I have also researched such graphics as beer labels (inspired by the Flying Dog beer label created by Ralph Steadman) and fun and quirky greeting cards by various artists. I took 2.5 hours researching all of these things that I have captured my curiosity. I feel that Tim Burton captures my style the most with human characters drawn in such a way that really shows the personality of the character, which is shown in the first drawing above. Ralph Steadman is also very interesting to me because his style is so unique the way he creates animals and people that usually take a different form than just animals and people. His use of ink is also unique and something that I want to explore. Yoshitomo Nara is another artist who has work that I feel is similar to mine. His usual focus is on children, but he gives them a twist so that the art is geared toward a more adult audience.

After researching, I started sketching people in a more expressive/abstract/surreal form different from what I am used to drawing. I then developed these sketches into more complete ideas of how I wanted to represent certain emotions. I came up with 6 images of certain strong emotions that I have had during the last week or so since classes started. This took me a total of 7.5 hours.

From here, I started to think more about what I wanted to accomplish for my IP project. I came up with a few ideas including things such as greeting cards for every single situation (even angry cards, drunk cards, flirting cards, etc.), trying to display every type of emotion or state in a distinct way, and documenting every emotion that I have. Coming up with these ideas took me about half an hour.

On top of trying to create something for my project, I also took about half an hour to start setting up my studio. I know that I want a place that I can feel comfortable in and which can also inspire me to create new things. I have not gotten so far with this yet, but I have ideas that are in progress.

Here are images of the emotions/states that I have felt lately and represented through an illustration. I had so much fun creating the 6 images. Personally, I am horrible at expressing my emotions vocally. I think anyone who knows me well can agree with this fact. It felt great to get these emotions out visually, however. I am so used to drawing realistically because it is basically the only style I have used when drawing and I have a lot of experience doing so, but after getting inspiration from artists who use a lot of expression and loose styles, it was really surprising to see that I could go this route also. I used colors that I wouldn't have normally used, got crazy with exaggerating the facial expressions, and even incorporated nonhuman elements into my drawings such as a leaky pipe to represent how I feel when I am sick. Drawing this way feels a lot more personal since I can use whatever style and color that I want and that I feel seems to get my exact feelings across. I also feel it is a lot more fun and interesting to create and view these types of drawings compared to more realistic drawings.

For next week, I plan to add more characters to my collection to represent my emotions for the beginning of the school year. I also plan to experiment more with my style. I want to see how crazy I can actually go, maybe to the point where you can hardly recognize the object as a human and you can just see a great amount of emotion being conveyed. I want to play around with more medium also, such as pastels, markers, and ink with brushes.