Aura

On this project 'Aura' I decided to portray my grandma, and her aura through oil pastels.  As a kid, i used to spend alot of time in my grandma's house.  Throughout my childhood a vision of my grandma was created in my mind, which to this day is still the same.  With all her religious beleifs, morals, values, and actions, i thought of her a certain way, and created an aura.  These colors and patterns radiate the same ideas i have of my grandma.  In this piece I focused on color to balance my main point, which is my grandma.

Self-portrait

This piece is a self portait.  I focused on the theme up close and personal.  My topic was abstraction, and my media was chalk pastel.  I chose this media because it creates great contrast between colors and the background as well.  On this piece i wanted to create something that went from a normal picture into broken up colors and shapes, or abstraction.  This represents what a person is made up of, more personally all the things that make me up. 

Frutos de la vida

In this piece i am portraying my grandparents and their relationship.  During their life they accomplished alot of things and are still able to look at each other this way.  Certain aspects of the piece represent my family as well.  I added three pieces of newspaper to emphasize the point that they had three daughters, one of them being my mother.  Also, i added the popping colors in the background to symbolize fruit, as the piece is named 'frutos de la vida', fruits of life.  I used cut paper to portray my grandparents.  I focused on space, as i wanted to fill the space with colors and textures to make a more unified piece.  Also, my theme was to layer it on, which is why I went from the bottom to the top.

Food

As a little kid one always looks at peoples actions and turn them into symbols as objects, or things.  In my childhood i characterized myself as a watcher, or bystander.  As my grandma, my great grandma or my mother would cook, i would observe what they made, not for content, but to know what is on the menu.  One thing i always noticed they did, no matter what foor they were preparing, was chop onions.  Onions turned to a symbol of not only food, but the women in my family that i looked up to.  In this picture i depict the onions on a cutting board. Using watercolor layering as a wet media and sharpie as my dry, i tried to show the different layers in the onions to make them look realistic.  I also used the placing of the onions for focus and movement throughout the piece.

Back to life

I had seen on the list of topics, and i saw one that really interested me, patterns.  As i had worked with wood pattern before i had thought to make wood pattern into a sculpture, a newspaper sculpture.  This brought along the idea that paper comes from wood, not the other way around.  However, i had a chance to flip that statement.  I had taken newspaper and layered it on, not only flat, but in circles and ovals to give it the same shape of the wood grain.  Later i cut the sides off the newspapers to make a more solid block, which also portrayed the pattern better.  I used a block of wood as the base and top of the sculpture, these two pieces were stained to give a more uniform look to my project.  Although this was the first idea in my mind, i saw one of the sides of newspaper that looked like a great piece and chose not to throw it away.  I erected this piece over the top of the block, creating more movement, and a tree-like piece on top of my project.  All in all the hard work i put into this sculpture made a piece i was more than pleased with.

Dimensions

For this painting i chose the idea of having different dimensions within one painting.  These dimensions were representing different times during the day, during life, which can impact a person.  This shows a negative impact towards a person.  The focal point was the character in the painting, portrayed in ink and white paper. The topic i had chosen for this project was distortion, as i wanted to distort the ambient around the person, not only with the different hues of coloration throughout the trees, but how i made the leaves as well. This is also how I made my character, without portraying her realistically, but more as an outcast that only connected with her surroundings in little ways.

The Bojangles Fish

This side project was a project to be done from a found object.  I had found a Bojangle's wrapper on the trash.  I folded it like a fish, added a background and some details to the fish. This created a childlike picture portraying a fish.