For this final project of the year I wanted to try and portray all that I had learned into one piece. I had a lot of familiarity with acrylic paint from our self portrait earlier in the year. At the start of this process I had no clue of where to start. I chose the project which would make us to paint an image that stuck with us from a story. Recently I have read two books, The Book of Negroes and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. My first idea was to paint the main character Aminita behind bars portraying the slavery in The Book of Negroes. The next class we worked on our ideas and I noticed that I would rather draw a scene from Huckleberry Finn, of Huck on his raft on the Mississippi River with his tobacco pipe. As I started to paint this I noticed that the painting did not hold much emotional value to me, do I really want to paint this for my final project of the year? I then asked Mrs. Cockburn if a movie would suffice as a book replacement, and the answer was yes. The idea of Notorious BIG hit me. He is my favourite artist who worked really hard to get to the top of the rap world. He lived in a struggle in Brooklyn selling drugs for money until his rap career exploded. In my painting I wanted to portray the rap-star with his top-hat and in a suit showing his young wealth. When first thinking about the painting I wanted to think of ways that I could make this painting not just a painting of Notorious BIG, but a painting of the rap-star that actually held value, and was connected to what he was like in real life. I searched the web and found a photo of Notorious painted in very vibrant colours to show the highlights on his face. This really stood out to me as a very interesting concept, one which I wanted to experiment with. I figured that these warm colours would portray Notorious’ warm talent and vibrant personality, as he was very well liked. The paint that I would be using would be applied very thick and rough to show that he is a rough and tough guy. This rough texture would hopefully show the viewer his struggle and how he had to hustle and fight to get to where he got to, where is at the top of the rap world.This leads me to my point in how important the planning of the painting was. I almost used process of elimination as I had two ideas at the start, The Book of Negroes, and Huckleberry Finn, and tried them both out, and both failed. But as I have learned throughout the whole year one learns from their mistakes. I was really stuck at this point as everyone had already started painting and I was yet to have a concrete idea. Once I thought of my Notorious BIG idea, I was really inspired. I found a lot of reference material on him and started painting right away. The planning was very important. I originally sketched a photo outside of class but then soon realized that this was not aloud. Since time was of the essence and I had the sketch of mine planted in my head I proceeded with that. If I had thought of this idea earlier I could have sketched another sketch in class, but since time was of the essence I trucked along through with no sketch. This is where I turned to my source material. I used these three pictures for the man part of the painting, the nose, the lips, and the colour, respectively.
This picture was extremly useful in helping me with my nose. I was not sure whether of not to paint a septum, but from most of the pictures I have seen when Notorious has his head back like in my painting his nostrils are all shaded out. To some the nostrils might look like a bear or pig, but when painting it is extremly tough to have a good balance between shading and looking like an animals nose. Overall my nose turned out fine, with many thanks to this photo.
This photo was one of my origianl peices of reference, and was where I thought of doing the different colours. This painting filled with colour set with me more than all of the others I had seen.
This picture was extremly helful with the lips. and especially the shading. It was tough to make the lips look that big and plump.
The biggest part of the process was my criticism. Throughout the whole process I found myself very attached to my painting and wanting to keep working on it. This gave me a lot of emotional attachment that if I messed up I would be very mad at myself. I felt that I could approach this criticism in two ways. One, let it get to my head and keep on with a grudge, or two, stand back and use this criticism to be extra sharp and find the finest mistakes to make the painting perfect (well maybe not perfect) One of the first things taught to me in this art class was that if one takes the time to stand back and look at their painting, the good things and the bad. Things are completely different 10 feet away rather than 1. By standing back and taking a deep breath in times of frustration, seemed to really help my progress. These times of frustration were prevalent throughout my painting process as I was fighting time and my high expectations that at many points were not met. Another big thing was the photo documentation. Usually these photos would be taken on the school camera but for this project I took them on my phone which had many advantages in the end. Since these images were on my phone I was constantly looking at them. I saw the stages from day to day, and I really helped me pick out the good and the bad things of the painting. It was extremely fun because I could pick certain things out, so when I next entered the art studio I knew exactly where to start and exactly what to do.
What stages did my first drawings play in the final product? As I already said I had previous drawings that were done outside of class. Since I was not aloud to use these I completed the rest of my painting off of reference material. For example, if I needed help with the lips I would find a photo of him with big lips and try to incorporate them. The rest of the painting was easy to go off of memory as I know his face so well. With the combination of reference material and the image that I had planted in my brain I was set. So to answer that question what role did my first drawings play in the final product, not too much.
