Evaluation

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.

Elektra

For Elektra I also produced two development pieces which will be uploaded at a later date.
My design for Elektra was to focus on her more as a graceful ninja-like assassin as opposed to the smutty pin-up girl kind of look the comics give her. To do this I looked at traditional ninjitsu wear and footwear like tabbies. I also went back to a style I used in my last project where I worked on textured paper, this time tea stained first, and painted on in dry brush to give the piece a Japanese feel.

Nightwing

My design for Nightwing was appropriately based on my Robin work.
I worked from photographs of myself with a painted mask influenced by JKB Fletcher's work and then thought about the function of his costume. Motorcycle gear would be appropriate for Nightwing as it acts as a suitable guard against most impact and is also very free to move about in.

Daredevil

My design for Daredevil stuck with his comicbook interpretation with a slightly more comfortable fashion so his costume looks more like clothes than the spandex suit. This gives the idea a bit more realism and this piece was more a stepping stone for an Elektra piece and hopefully a future piece featuring both DD and Elektra. These two were quick pieces

Deadpool

My concept behind Deadpool was using a stitched leather horror style mask to add an element of quick unpredictability and looking at riot gear as a type of urban armour Deadpool might wear. 

 

Carnage

These three Carnage pieces are created using an acrylic painted collage as the background, followed by a a red ink monoprint to the shape of my model and finished with the eyes and mouth's glued on and black ink used for some tone.
My influence behind this was how artist H.R. Giger (Alien) used machinery and industrial elements in his work in place of organic features. In my pieces I looked at trees as living organisms and creating a texture of dead tree branches I acted as this for my collage working in Carnage's tendrills.

Harley Quinn

My Harley Quinn concept comes from traditional Jester costuming and facepaint along with the original HQ design.
Harley is one of my favorite comic book characters and my model for this piece easily fits the role, I like the psychology behind the character and this enforced my style of painting for the piece. I took to thinking of spatter art and running paint for heavy expressionism and to enforce a sense of chaos. A traditional painting of a sane person would work within the lines whereas with a character like Harley the lines are there to be broken. I was influenced by the work of Jason Oakes in this style of painting as he has a similar Harley Quinn piece done digitally.

Robin

My Robin concept comes from an urban hero sort of vibe. I worked around functional body armour like paintball armour plating for the costume and rather than using a domino mask for the character I chose to use face paint keeping with the urban theme. I was influenced through JKB Fletcher's artwork where he paints models from photographs where they are painted like superheroes and used this for my inspiration. Robin has often been received as a weak character by those unfamiliar with his grittier stories so to enforce this I chose a rainy setting for each piece to give the character a hard edge.

Iron Man

My design for Iron Man comes from a concept of a large variety of Iron Man suits including the likes of the Hulkbuster and the Silver Centurion. This accompanied by the designs of medieval armour and a futuristic armour called TALOS being produced for US Marines came together to create a design to work off for my Iron Man. The idea itself is influenced from blueprint designs and more prominently a scene from the first Iron Man film where Tony Stark layers his missile designs over each other revealing the plans for the first Iron Man armour when flattened out. To create this piece successfully I has to think realistically about how the suit would be assembled. I focused my research on how the films and cartoons have portrayed the action along with how technicians have created their own Iron Man technology using mechanics and lasers as such. These pieces where created using 3 sheets of acetate taped to paper, starting with a drawing on paper using pencil, followed by a marker pen on acetate and finished in colour using acrylic paint.

The Flash

The Flash motion test 1.
I was trying to find the best way of displaying a sense of movement through these pieces so I first tried smudging chalk pastels in an attempt to create a blur effect, but I lost a lot of detail through this and in trying to bring that detail back the piece looked too illustrative.

The Flash motion test 2.
My second experiment was to produce a movement drawing using my model's running motion I captured in a video and screen shotted almost like an animation run cycle overlaying the image and painting it with acrylic paints. I got a closer result to what I was after but it still wasn't guite right.

The Flash motion test 3.
My most succesful piece, this painting I used heavy expressive brush strokes and a pallete knife to showcase the movement of The Flash. I added stroked to all the movement the body would make running rather than just spreading the paint to one side. You can see this in the arm on the left how the arm's movement is a different motion to everywhere else

The Punisher

The Punisher 3
Created using Charcoal and Indian Ink on A3 Cartrdge paper.
The reference behind my Punisher design is taking the character back to his routes as a US marine kitting him out in marine body armor but with a black urban styling and a painted on skull.
This piece I like but isn't as good as the second or third, the face was my point of priority for this piece because I like how the light captured the model just right to the point where he looked very sinister and with the smirk added it takes you into the mentality of The Punisher in him taking pleasure in his work

Created using Charcoal and Indian Ink on A3 Cartrdge paper.
The reference behind my Punisher design is taking the character back to his routes as a US marine kitting him out in marine body armor but with a black urban styling and a painted on skull.
This one is to reflect the skull on Castle's own face to show that if the skull emblem is what signifies The Punisher, then the emblem inside him declares he IS The Punisher and it's not just a matter of symbols.

The Punisher 4
Created using Charcoal and Indian Ink on A3 Cartrdge paper.
The reference behind my Punisher design is taking the character back to his routes as a US marine kitting him out in marine body armor but with a black urban styling and a painted on skull.
This is my second favourite, I wanted to play about a bit with the setting and working from my photo there was a lot of blank space that I could easily transform into a setting and I wanted to actually place the character somewhere he would fit in.

The Punisher 2
Created using Charcoal and Indian Ink on A3 Cartrdge paper.
The reference behind my Punisher design is taking the character back to his routes as a US marine kitting him out in marine body armor but with a black urban styling and a painted on skull.
This is my favorite of the pieces, it is a good example of all three elements that make my Punisher together. My model is drawn well and is a good resemblance, the armor is prominent and minus the skull is a good representation of a soldier and then the Skull itself separates him from just a soldier and shows that it is The Punisher.

Thor and Loki Linoprints

My first two pieces were re-designs of Thor and Loki taking their comic book interpretation back to their Norse mythology/ viking routes with some of their comicbook elements still there.
For these I looked at viking wear and armour, busts and artwork based on the description of the norse gods along with their original designs