Jingxuan's Blog

1. oil painting (Greyscale)

 

2. Acrylic Painting (Colored)

These paintings are for my media testing (for the portrait drawing project)

The first one is an oil painting. During the painting process, I was going through a lot of pain because of oil is so hard to use to paint. Because first, my style of drawing is not the smooth kind, I love to use strokes to show the difference between the things that I am drawing. Second, putting paint directly onto the painting surface before mixing it well is also something that I really like to do because it creates a dreamy color.

In the second picture, the media that I was using was acrylic, which I have been working for a long long period of time, so I feel more comfortable using this. I like putting color directly on to my painting surface and use a spatula to draw.

The most important reason that makes me like using acrylic over using oil is that oil drys too slow and I am a fast worker. I tend to finish my work really fast, so if the paint drys too slow, I cannot work in layers.

Comparing these two type of media that we are using, I like and feel comfortable when using acrylic way more than oil.

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For this project, we are working with Photoshop. The theme to work with is cultural differences, the theme is quite hard to work with because we are trying to show the differences between cultures by putting and merging them together.

HOLLOW(series) #1

HOLLOW(series) #2

The title of my work is ‘hollow’, first, visually, it is a piece where I have a

part of my body disappear, and levitate, so it looks like I am hollow. Inside me, there are buildings of m

y two cultures. It is supposed to show that my outside is just my skin wrapping what I really am, my identity, what and who I think I am. I did a series of composite images, and they relate to each other by sharing the same elements of surrealism: levitation, juxtaposition, and scale. Also sharing the same color scheme: red, pink and grey. The smoke around me is trying to tell that just by my eyes, I cannot see or myself completely, I have to feel what’s inside me that makes me myself. One more thing is that the smoke/mist partly represents the pollution of China, which is in one of my cultures. The cultures that I tried to show in my piece is Chinese and American. This series’ name is called HOLLOW because, in my heart, I don’t know where exactly I belong to, and knowing that really makes me feel just a little bit lonely I guess. If I choose another person as my subject, I would try to not use pictures of themselves but use more symbolism (make my piece less literal).

Detail about the surreal devices that I used:

First, I used levitation in my piece by cutting a part of my body off which visually looks like my upper body is floating, it is my favorite device to use in a project, because what I feel is

that it creates a very relaxing and spacious feeling, it calms me down.

Second, I used juxtaposition. Buildings don’t normally be inside humans, what I am doing here is that I am representing my two converging cultures with buildings and merge it into my body, which means I was born with this, this is my identity.

Jayan Saputra inspired me in this project. I borrowed the idea of cutting off half of the head and putting something in it. When I saw the picture, it’s like something just suddenly went through my head, and I had an idea of what to do.

My studio piece is completely different from what I imagined it would be. My first idea was quite literal. It was me sitting in a boat and traveling from one end to the other end of the sea. Now I think that if I have enough time, I can do my initial idea too. In this project, the challenges that happened to me was that I couldn’t create realistic shadows, even I watch tutorials. Also, when I put cloud onto my piece, it was weird and not realistic, and I didn’t know how I can make it better. To overcome the challenge, I asked for feedback from people. After that, I was able to make my work better. There is another way, which is to look at my work from far away, I learned that from sketching.

I challenged myself to use some new ideas and techniques that I learned during class watching tutorials. For example, I learned to warp things, crop, and how to select hair properly. I tried very hard to improve my workmanship by constantly checking the quality of the pictures, the edges, and the masks. Before this project, I used to not care about having clear edges, but now, I want every picture that I use to be perfect, even it is only a little bird flying on top of the sky.

For this project, I engaged in my work by focusing on it 100% while working on it, thinking about how I can enhance it to make it better, and do my best. For example, I was asking my friends during lunch how I can make this piece better.

During the process of creating my final product, I actually had a lot of different ideas for what to do. But reflecting upon those ideas, they are either too literal or not feasible.

For this picture, I was going to put bubble around me which has famous places and buildings of the cultures in it, but I found that not feasible because the bubble makes whats inside it changes, curves it, and with different lighting, everything changes, so I couldn’t find a good background to use.

I tried to look at other people’s artwork for inspiration and looked at a few famous artists. It helped me a lot because I got to know how artists work in their studio, what it takes them to create their final product, and how they manage their time well so that their project will be finished on time.This picture inspired me to create my artwork. By Jayan Saputra

inception effect

fruit face

double exposure

Geometric reflection

Geometric reflection #2

Kaleidoscope

In a Box

This project is where you are given a box and a theme and create something related to the theme. Using my understanding of the theme “Fantasy” that I was given, I started and ended up completely different ideas. My first thoughts were great but not feasible after a few changed, I had my final plan. While working on my project, my final plan changed completely and it looks nothing like what I started with.

My final plan

Through this project, I had a lot of problems. The final plan was not very feasible, so I changed it, but the composition looked weird and it didn’t fit my theme of fantasy. I overcame the problem by thinking and trying different things again and again until it worked. After this project, I learned the importance of asking for feedback and composition. Different places you place the objects can have different meanings.

My first draft of my box

My ideas for my box

Artist’s habit of mind

During creating the final box, I developed crafts with different materials, airdried clay, acrylic paint, I used cotton for mist, I used a paper mask as a base for the person’s face. I also took a wine bottle and ripped the label off and made a new one in photoshop. For the last touch, I inserted led lights (christmas light) into the cotton. When I was trying different medias, I envisioned how it would turn out and eliminated some ideas that didn’t fit with my theme. In this project, I expressed what I wanted to show others in my box, which is “If you just open your eyes and look for it, it will be there.”

 

 

For this project, we were asked to choose clothes that we usually wear and take a picture, then, we adjust the lighting, changed the picture to black and white and drew the picture. We used charcoal, a media that I don’t use that much, so I was unfamiliar with it.  The piece looked quite different from what I envisioned, I thought that I would fail drawing this assignment because I don’t like using charcoal. For this project, there are numbers of challenges, but the most challenging problem is to keep everything clean. I addressed these challenges by ignoring the black dots on my work, cleaning them up when I finished so it would be more efficient and I won’t make the work dirty again.In this project, I had difficulties on the technique part too. I don’t usually use charcoal so it is much harder than drawing with pencil. But after a few classes, I got used to charcoal and I found out that I can rub my tissue paper on the darkest compressed charcoal which creates a lot of charcoal powder while drawing, by rubbing my tissue paper, it catches the charcoal powder and it is also really smooth to shade areas with tissue paper. I really pushed myself to do my best, when I was not used to using charcoal, I drew really slow and wasted a lot of time, but after I got used to charcoal, I worked efficiently and finished the charcoal faster then I envisioned.

 

The paper that we were using was big, and I found out that I can smooth the charcoal out by using a soft eraser, but the surface area of the paper is big, relatively using a soft eraser that has a small surface area and might erase the charcoal, I chose to use tissue paper. It seems easy, but it took my classes to figure out how to shade with charcoal. I pushed and stretched my ability to draw with a new media. When I figured out the method to use charcoal and control it better, I drew for three hours straight. Comparing to what I usually do, I stretched and explored my potential to draw with charcoal.

I observed a lot because this is an observing drawing, and it is a picture, so it is very realistic. I divided the paper into four parts to be accurate. The major challenge of being accurate is to draw out the smoothness of the wrinkles and the bringing out the high light, but with the soft eraser, I was able to clean up the whole drawing which brought out the high light and made the drawing realistic.

 

Last, I reflected on my work a lot. Due to the size of the paper, I kept moving away from my drawing so that I can see where the drawing is going. I also took pictures of my drawing and asked others how I can make it better.

 

 

For this “fast and slow” assignment, we used gesture drawing and contour lines, for the fast, it is gesture drawing, for the slow, it is contour lines.Gestural drawing is when you hold the brush light and lose, and it is catching the shapes. contour line drawing is looking at shapes and drawing them out with continuous lines, it should be very detailed. For this assignment, I used watercolor and pen. If someone was doing this assignment for the first time, I would tell them to look at the shapes more carefully during the “fast”, think of the composition or you can zoom in. For this assignment, I found that when I am doing the “slow” part which is the contour lines, I can’t match up my lines, some of them are too high, some of them are too short.By doing this assignment, I learned that I have to look carefully into the shapes and when I’m drawing, I have to think about the whole picture but not only the part that I’m on.