My own emotions

What I Did: 

5 hours revising my thesis paper
6 hours remembering exact emotions from the 7 moments I am going to capture and sketching out how my face might have looked
1 hour taking more pictures of the sites
3 hours researching artists that draw self portraits that contain a lot of emotion and graffiti on brick walls
4 hours beginning to plan face in East Quad courtyard

What I Encountered/Discovered:

Before I got started on the planning of the faces in the different locations, I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what emotions I wanted to convey in each one. They need to be very true and personal emotions for me, and I do not want them to be so generic. That's why I took a long time writing down a bunch of words that described each period of time and then sketched my facial expressions according to those words.

Then I looked up some artists who do self portraits to see in what ways they convey a lot of emotion.

Dave Kinsey, Scream

I love this painting by Dave Kinsey. The colors are loud, and the distressed look of the black is angry and disturbing. I love how the mouth is the only thing you can see on the man's face. You cannot deny that there is so much emotion in this painting. Even though his style is different from mine, it makes me think about the different colors I can use to express the emotion, and how I don't need to include everything on the face to convey a true emotion. Maybe just a mouth will do.


It is much easier to make faces and characters out of structures that already look like they have parts of a face included in them. I am finding it harder to find structures that I can transform into a face when they have to be in a specific area, especially when I want them to capture a certain emotion and expression. I found some good spots in East Quad courtyard, however, and I liked how I transformed the 3 spots for different reasons. I like the face on the brick wall, because I did not draw on the mortar, which makes the face a little bit more hidden, it looks like it is more integrated into the wall, and it makes the mortar stand out, like it is in front of the face. The first one, I Photoshopped my just my eyes into the wall. It reminds me a lot of JR's faces on walls. After I thought about all of the emotions that I had that day I moved in, I tried to make my face look like I had all of those emotions inside me, and I took a picture of myself, so this is a true personal emotion. I am just not sure if just my eyes can convey all of those emotions. I also went back to my drawings of faces and did two other versions of the brick wall. I tried to use some of the bricks for the teeth in one face, but I don't think I successfully combined them. I really like the face in the gate, because parts of the gate really make up part of a face. It does not have a realistic expression, but it actually does get at the emotion I am trying to convey, which is excitement/nervousness. For this option, I would only need to color parts of the gate, but I do not need to draw anything, unless I wanted to add parts to it. The bench is my least favorite, because I do not like how the eyes are placed on it, but for the mouth, I realized that I could draw the bottom part on the ground, so that you can only see the whole mouth from a certain angle. It could also look like the mouth is opening as you back up.

Before I created the face on the wall, I looked at some ways other artists have used a brick wall as their canvas in creative ways.

I like in this one how the faces are just huge and unavoidable. The detail and colors are fantastic also.

The bike actually juts out of the wall in this piece, which an architect built. Obviously I wouldn't be able to do this with my face, but I was wondering if I could make an illusion that my face would do this.

 I thought this was clever by only using one of the bricks for the art, but it is a very powerful image.

Even though I have not been using patterns in my pieces, I just thought it was an interesting idea that this artist used a brick pattern to create this monster, but it is a different pattern than the brick he placed it on. It stands out a lot, but it uses the site nicely.

What I Plan To Do Next:

Now that I have some ideas that have been planned out and other ideas that are still in progress, I think I can get this ball rolling a little faster and really get into my project. I think I need some feedback on this first location, but I will get to work on planning one or two other locations this weekend.