FMP Evaluation
For my FMP project, I continued my work from Meetings
and Connections. Since there were a lot of ideas, characters and pieces I had
planned to do for Meetings and Connections that I didn't have the time to get
around to, I started my work continuing these. A quick summary of what my
meetings and connections project was, using my friends and family as models to
work from, re-imagining them as superheroes or villains and placing them in a
realistic or artful form. An example of this is in my last project I used a
college student to model as Superman, but re-styling him using Spartan and
gladiator clothing. My specialist area is fine art particularly painting, as it
is what I enjoy working in and provides the best results for what I aim to
accomplish.
I began by researching artists who have the same idea for a context as me, which is to display fantasy / comic book art as a respected fine art form. To do this I researched the likes of JKB Fletcher, an oil painter who begins his work by painting a model in body paint as superheroes, photographing them and then painting on large canvases these images, Al Molina, another painter who works from film stills but has nice paint quality, Jason Oakes who produces digital pieces based on comic book characters but in an expressive style that looks hand painted and finally Mendy Zimmerman who produced a piece based on The Flash in a nice motion painting style. I also managed to connect to Jason Oakes through social media as well as coming across various other similar artists over Facebook. As with my last project my research influenced my work as I found that I used styles or methods based on what I researched from these artists such as using face paint in photographs to work from and creating vibrant expressive pieces like Jason Oakes’ work.
My target audience is the same as my meetings and connections one as I am continuing the project and plan to continue working with my audience.
'My target audience for this work and most likely my future art work falls under friends and family as they are the models for my art work and would support my work, the local community because I like to place my models compositionally and physically in a real location so anyone familiar with that location or someone who knows the artwork and visits the location can connect with both the work and the location. Also my audience would consist of the geek sub culture based on my subject matter of comic books and fantasy. I have a Facebook page created for my artwork which has my college work as well as some home artwork and based on the demographics for that I confirmed my target audience as what I presumed.'
Through my development I continued the process of my meetings and connections work. Working from photographs of my models, historical and contextual research I gathered for each character and the character's original design, I would re-design each character to fit either the setting or character background. My re-designs are all based around the character, how they fit into my backgrounds and how they can be perceived realistically. The things I consider in the making of these designs are what makes the character's iconic or recognizable, (these usually involve colour schemes, insignias or headgear) The type of material or design would provide the appropriate either function or protection for the characters, (motorcycle suits, body armour) and what contextually I could find to bring some realism to the characters (e.g. my Harley Quinn design goes back to the route of medieval jester clothing).
For each character and their design I would then consider what media and style would work best for the characters. An example of this consideration is how I chose to produce lino prints for the Thor and Loki pieces as they are reminiscent of myth based etchings.
The various types of media I used in this project are as follows:
Pencil
Acrylic Paint
Lino print
Collage
Mono print
Charcoal
Watercolour paint
Soft Pastels
Ink
Oil Pastel
(some of these mixed media pieces)
There were a few pieces that didn’t go as expected but the vast majority of them worked better than imagined and I am happy with the quality and standard of work I produced over this project.
For my Final Piece, I produced two large scaled paintings. The first of these is based on me re-imagined as The Joker. I was working from a photographic manipulation of myself re-coloured as The Joker using acrylic paint on a 1-metre² canvas. The canvas was collaged first using photographs of me as the villain expressing different faces of emotion and then warped digitally. I also added burnt Joker playing cards to the collage. My piece is an expressive painting with a high contrast and bold colours and visually looks very dynamic. There's no message behind it other than some slight allusions to schizophrenia and insanity. The expressions in the collage are all reflective of the one character as if all the faces are voices or emotions in his head.
My second piece is an A1
acrylic painting on canvas of Nicole as Rogue from the X-Men. What I love about
the X-men, is that they are probably the most politically influenced mainstream
comic book characters as their story's are essentially about racism and
fascism. I had in mind for my Rogue piece to have her walking past an
anti-mutant protest upset and I went on to link this scene to the events of
Little Rock High School with Elizabeth Eckford. I created a graphic
manipulation placing Nicole in place of Eckford and used that as a starting
point for my piece. I then collected a few images of the Little Rock protest,
as well as some other protest scenes to pick parts out of the photographs to
use in my composition.
Out of the two pieces, I prefer the Joker one because I find that there are no weak areas in the piece, however the Rogue piece has a share of both good elements and bad elements. I put this down to the difficulty I found in working from a black and white photograph, but I'm happy with the finished result as a whole despite the poor elements.
If I could change anything about the project, it would be to have had longer on the project as there are still characters that I did not get round to working on. I would also like to develop the X-Men project a bit further and dedicate a line of work, purely to working on pieces based on the characters linking into historical cases of racism and fascism.
I have enjoyed working on my past two projects and found that I really connected with my work and was enthusiastic about it. My artwork has vastly improved since starting the course, over each project and I am happy with the standard of work that I produce.
The most important skill I have learnt over the project was to develop my work more. Previously I have been completing work to a standard I was happy with, but more could have been done to make the piece even better. I have learnt that I can produce really great artwork if I continue working past my development. It has also become present through my smaller development pieces; my latter pieces are usually better as more practice has gone into them. I feel that I have become a gifted painter and I am capable of using most types of media.
I see myself continuing to work in the creative industry by owning an art studio in the future. There I will primarily teach creative techniques, skills and other artistic practices to people of all ages, as well as renting out the studio space to practicing artists and setting up exhibitions within the studio. I feel that my practice with different media and skills as a painter will benefit this and I am capable of imparting this knowledge onto others.
