FMP Evaluation

Evaluation

The Final Major Project is founded on a biographical subject, based on the story of a person, place, art movement or a historical event. I thought about the things I am interested in and the things that make me who I am, after making a list of all of these things, I decided that the best thing for me would to base my FMP around Greek mythology.

I have had a huge interest in Greek mythology since I was very young, I find the stories and art extremely fascinating, and throughout my childhood I have read the stories and have been engrossed by the statues built to exalt the deities and the people who have inspired the arts which have echoed through the centuries.

 From the small vases to the giant statues built to worship the gods with precise and intricate details, so I will be exploring the stories and recreating them and the structures through my art work.

I built up a huge collection of images and materials to create a series of collages, using printed images, book pages, magazines and other things, I then researched a selection of different collage artist and created my own style of collaging technique, I didn't really use collage in most of my work, although I found it interesting, I prefer to put detail into my work myself and rely on myself to create an image.

I used several different mediums in my work.

Photography

Although only used the photographs as a visual reference, photography has been extremely useful during my project, being able to capture an image and recreate it as my own, such as I have done in my final piece, I used the images of a tutor to create a reference point and paint him as a the God of War Ares.

Graphics

I only did one piece of work regarding to graphics in my project, using one of my photographs of Matt I have edited the image using several effects on both Photoshop and illustrator. I have cropped the image to give it an intriguing composition, darkened certain sections to emphasize them and give the image an effect of a painting to give it a very dark and serious painting. I don’t exactly respond well to the graphic side of art as I prefer to create an image in a more traditional way otherwise I may have continued to create more digital images.

3D

I attempted to recreate a statue of Zeus using a drawing I did of a one of his statues, the piece didn’t turn out exactly how I had imagined it, the quality of the piece was poor, I feel if I had more time to practice or create a series of structures I could possibly have made a very successful piece, unfortunately the duration wasn't quite long enough and I had been concentrating on my painting.

Drawing and painting

My strongest point of my artist abilities are my drawings and paintings, I find it easy to structure an image and capture the tonal and line qualities, specifically more with portraiture, I find it interesting how a person’s body language and facial expressions can capture the emotion of a subject, for instance, the slightest movement in someone’s eyebrow or cheek can change the expression of happy to sad or angry to surprised, it intrigues me to attempt to capture this. This is why I chose to do my final piece as a large portrait of Matt representing the God of war, Ares, using acrylic paints on canvas. The image was fairly successful, I feel I have captured the emotion of anger I had tried to, I have also avoided cluttering the image with a background to keep the attention on the main subject, and I believe the composition of the piece allows the subject to seem ‘mighty’ and ‘godlike’. Although I have only had good reviews and appraisals from my peers and tutors, I feel the image could improve, in no specific section, I just feel I could have done better.  

Myrrha an Cinyras

One of the pieces I had previously posted was one of Myrrha and Cinyras, after looking back on the image I had done, I have realised that it looked unpleasant and cluttered, the drawing of the figures look unprofessional, the paint work was poor as there is no concept of colour or tonality, the bordering looks shabby and the image is cluttered. So I decided to recreate the image in a different way,

The image is of the same concept, that Myrrha has ran into the forest after tricking her father into incestuous activities,  and the gods heard her cries to be punished, and turned her into a tree.

I believe the second image is a lot more successful than the original, the composition gives it a greater effect of a solid structure, and I have avoided cluttering the image with unnecessary items which draws focus to the main feature.

I have added certain things to give the image to give the appearance of a tree, such as the leaves at the end of the woman's hands and in her hair, and the look of roots entwined with her lower legs.

Final piece

I have used the images of Matt, which I used to do the smaller paintings to create a large painting around, 6’x4’ using acrylic paints,

As I forgot to photograph my progress and have no images to show the development, but I started out by stretching up a canvas and drawing the image I had chosen of Matt to the size I wanted and added slight detail before painting the piece.  

I am extremely happy with the final outcome of the piece, I believe the choice of colours and paints was almost perfect, with the acrylic i was able to layer the colours and give several different textures and tones to certain areas of the image, for example the eyes and the beard.

with the beard using the layers to give of the affect of real hair rather than a stuck on beard, and the shading and highlight around the eyes wouldn't have the same affects.

the only part of the piece I believe could use some improvement is the mouth, every time I attempt to paint a mouth it never seems to look quite right, this is something I will attempt to improve. 

Ares

My favourite Olympian god is Ares (Mars), the god of war, and I have been thinking of a way which I could create a piece to show him for all he is. The only problem with Ares is that he is quite difficult to portray, as he isn’t very distinctive, the way most recreate him is with a helmet on, but by doing so it might be any other soldier.

I had an idea of how to portray him as more than the average soldier, I thought it may look good if the helmet he wears is part of him, an attachment to his skin, so I created an image from imagination to show this idea, however the image isn’t a very realistic. After talking to my tutors the image I had created resembled a student tutor, matt, and so I took some photographs of matt with a light in his face in a dark room to try and get some realism into to image I was going to create, I then went on to drawing, and painting some of the images. I am very pleased with the outcome and I think that this could be a way for me to some interesting pieces in the future.

Hades

The brother of Zeus and Poseidon; Hades, the lord of the underworld and everything dark,

Through the media, hades has been seen as the personification of evil, a temperamental monster, although the original stories described hades as quite a fair god. Apart from his trickery of his wife Persephone, who he obtained through abduction. Hades would only show his anger if someone where to try cheat him or escape his realm of the dead.

I used a  painting of him and personalised it and added his name in ancient Greek at the bottom of the page.

 

Medusa

Using an image I found online I have created a collage of the mythical creature/woman Medusa, the snake haired gorgon, but changing it slightly to suit my style.

Icarus

Icarus was the son of the master craftsmen Daedalus, who constructed his son a pair of wings from feathers and wax to escape from Crete, he then instructed him not to fly to close to the sun as the wax would melt, Icarus ignored this warning and his wings melted and he fell into the sea and drowned, the is now named after him, the Icarian sea.

I decided to carry on using the collage technique but in a different way then I am used to, by using the different coloured paper I have been able to use a variety of shades and tones and using white pencil to create my image. 

I have incorporated the sun faintly into the background of the image and i have also added the island of Crete at the bottom of the page

Island of Crete

other artist have depicted the story in different mediums such as painting and sculpture;

'The Fall of Icarus', 17th century, Musée Antoine Vivene

Draper Herbert James: Mourning for Icarus

Zeus Statue

I chose to draw an image of the a statue of Zeus' head, I found the image fascinating as the way the sculpture has carved the structures hair, and the dominance portrayed in it.

I wanted to replicate it in an image in black and grey, so I used several different types of pencil with a variety of different shades to give a diverse range of shade.
I have decided to leave the image 'unfinished' as i believe finishing it would take aways its artistic appearence.

Paintings

I have took it upon myself to paint some images of the statues I have researched

Perseus and Medusa

Statue Of David

Theseus and the Minotaur

Greek Collages

To start off the project, the first step was to build up a collection of images and materials of varying textures, and using these to create collages based around the chosen subject, I then found some books based on the Greek sculptures, although some of the sculptures weren't based around the mythology, the aspects of the statues were very visually appealing. I also used some images of paintings and sculptures I had found on-line and different images from and line qualities of paper from news papers and other magazines.

these are some of the collages I have produced so far;

This is the first piece I have done, I used a piece of paper to create a black line behind the images, I then stuck photocopied images of a drawing and painting I have done previously, the one on the top is a sketch of the Perseus and Medusa statue, the bottom left is a painting of the David statue.

I am quite proud of the way this piece has come out, I used an image I had photocopied to create a stencil I then used the stencil to cut out from a book based on Greek sculpture, I used the typing horizontally to create a posture and by tilting the letters for the helmet it shows certain angles as it does in the image.

for this image I have used tea to dye the paper a bronze colour to emulate the statue. I then sketched out an image of the statue shown above.

for the rest of the images i have used many types of papers with different tonal qualities to give different effects, one of which I am proud of is the old sepia looking paper such as an old encyclopaedia which I had photocopied images and drawings on.

I have used a certain style of composition in my collages to emphasize the difference between light and dark, and the images a certain structural quality. I feel this draws more attention to the main images and in unison give the image an interesting visual quality

In this image I have tried to experiment with a different style of collaging, though the image has no structural quality and looks unprofessional and disorganised.  

This image was the most complicated of all,  I used a piece of cardboard underneath the images to add a layers  and different textures, the image layered on top of the cardboard is an image i have photocopied onto a piece of paper i had already put which gives the image a layered effect, I then used several layers of images and different types of paper such as book exerts and an image of lightning also photocopied.

Mounted Collage

The unit requires us to stretch up a collage and mount it, I stuck to my style and created one I am pretty happy with.