This painting above symbolizes the symmetry in Kanye West’s music. For me, Kanye has always been my favorite artist of all time with the consistency of his music and him always pushing new styles forward in the hip-hop industry. I wanted to capture my love for Kanye by painting two of my favorite albums he has made to this day, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”, and “808’s and Heartbreak”. MBDTF is the one depicted in the top right with the pixelated middle art and then a strong red background. This album has so much to offer even 11 years after its release. With songs like “Power” and “All of the Lights” it’s no wonder why so many people regard this album as one of Kanye’s top works of art. The second album 808’s and Heartbreak takes on a more personal tone and speaks to the listener instead of the whole audience. You really start to feel a connection with Kanye’s music in this album as he talks about his problems and the things that he’s dealing with in his own life. These two albums have been so influential in my own life because of the motivation and inspiration that they give me on a daily basis.
The picture above was the first-ever project I worked on in Art 1. It was one of my favorites because of the simplicity of the requirements and the fact that they allowed you to push the bounds of your creativity and mix and match your ideas in any which way. At the bottom, the two hands were taken from the sisteen chapel where it was one of the most iconic depictions of man and god that we have seen. I thought that this would have been a perfect picture to depict a story behind a set of hands and thought that it fit right in with the project's prompt. Next, I drew a single fist. I drew this fist because of the power and strength that it signifies in our society today. Lastly, I drew the pinky promise between two hands. This was my favorite one because this was the best way to show love and trust through hands and I loved how it came out.
My hardest project was definitely the one right above. It took me the longest time to complete and had the hardest skills to learn throughout the semester. I workshopped around a dozen ideas for this project until I finally decided to go with this abstract design. The Infinity triangle in the back is actually a company's logo, Palace, but I thought that it would look awesome in this shading project. Next, I overlapped this triangle with circles that had three rings each. The shading on these came out great in some and ok in others. If I could go back and change something I definitely would have made all of the shading for the circles the same pattern. One of the side products from this project that was insanely annoying was all of the smearing of graphite and how the side of my hand was covered in grey ash every day.
These are some of my favorite sketchbooks and little doodles all year. I think that the sketchbooks were a fun idea and kept a consistent workload throughout the semester. Some of my favorite prompts are above, and there are some prompts that didn't interest me that much, but it was still relaxing to be able to just sit back and focus on something simple for an hour a week. As we got more and more into the year we started to use new mediums of art which allowed us to create different designs and reimagine what our sketchbooks would look like every week. The other purpose for our sketchbooks was our doodles. I have a ton of doodles in my sketchbook, but most of them are incomplete or just done in a rush. Some of them I went back and completed as you can see above, but I think that the point of doodles is to be just a quick burst of passion that fizzles out just as fast as it came. Doodles aren't really supposed to be refined works of art, but an expression to distract someone or to take their mind off of something temporarily.