Us and Them

This week long project was all about understanding portraits and what can be classed as one. For this we had to create an appendage which can describe another persons personality, so in order to understand it more clearly we had to produce a range of portraits in different formats. These included photographs, collage, photo montage, line drawing, wire drawing, painting and sculpture. The person I was focusing this project around was Leanne Haywood. To start the project off we had to interview each other to find out about our different interests and aspects of our personalities. 

Our first set task was to take photographs of each other to portray a likeness. These are examples taken from my sketchbook. Here I was portraying Leanne as being quiet and shy. The lighting was bright and really helped to bring out her features. 

During this project I really enjoyed creating a wire drawing. I have used wire before in sculptural terms, but have never considered it as a drawing method. I thought this looked really effective and layering the wire up created a really illustrative effect. My wire drawing seems to have its own character which I really like. 

I didn't particularly enjoy creating a cardboard mask, as we weren't given much time or materials so I had to think very quickly. I created this mask to present Leanne's eyes and glasses, as I believe this is a strong feature of hers. To improve I would plan before going straight into it so I thought more about what I was making. 

I also enjoyed painting with white emulsion and black ink on brown paper. These types of media really stood out on the brown paper. I also really liked how the two mediums worked together to create different colours in certain areas. I felt my half of the sheet worked really effectively and stood out, however when the ink ran it ruined it which is disappointing. 

Our final outcome was to create an appendage which could be applied to the body. In my case I made a medal/name tag to describe Leanne's personality. I used Paisley patterned paper as a way of showing her favourite pattern, black lace type material as a way of showing her favourite colour, music sheets to show her passion for music, a metal skull decoration to represent a symbol of a band she likes, red tartan to symbolise her hair colour and gothic hand drawn type to show her personality. I think this worked really well and all the materials worked well together. It was a good project to get to know someone better. I know of Leanne from my previous college but this task enabled me to understand her personality more which was interesting. To improve this piece I would have tried to create materials myself such as designing the Paisley pattern.