City Landscape - Moments & Stories
Introduction
This project was linked to the ‘City Shoot’ project of the ‘Introduction to Photography’ course. We were to use the images from the city shoot project field trip as inspiration to produce 2 artworks. Each work was to tell a new story about the selected image. The objective of this project was to study the visual characteristics of value/color and the perceptual and textile propriety of texture in the development of form and creation of meaning.
Materials
Photo of city landscape
tracing paper
Black Canson Paper
Soft Pastels
Pencil Crayons
Sketch paper
I immediately knew what photo I wanted to work with and I just needed to figure out how to render to narrative aspect of the assignment. Here is the photo I wanted to use:
Serendipity: I loved that there was a person right in the middle of the frame but it was also what made the photo unsuitable for the original photography assignment as no figure was allowed. Who knew it would be the main element for this project?
First things first, I traced the image and copied it onto few sketch papers for experimentation.
I was pretty certain that I wanted to used the Canson paper for the achromatic work to vivify the wintry mood. I experimented a bit more to come up with the final chromatic work.
Finally, I decided to use only white on black to intensify the winter tonality of the city and give it an icy texture by using the spaces between the branches. I first used the graphite tracing technique by covering the back of the tracing paper with graphite then traced over it with white pencil crayon. The most time was spent to transform the spaces between the branches in to a space with a crackly, icy feel.
For my chromatic work, I decided to give it a more fantastical touch by having a blend of bright colours and rendering a minimal amount of lines in black. First I put on a combination of colours in soft pastels that looked the most fantastic to me then blended it with my fingers. In order to heighten the narrative, I added livelier elements like a girl with a cat and some butterflies. I also substituted the falling snow for falling flower blossoms.
Here is how my finished work looked side by side:
Conclusion
I appreciated this assignment for the opportunity to experiment with new mediums in a non-threatening way. Using white only on black paper is my new favourite way of working. I also liked the behaviour of soft pastels than blend into each other alot and hope to explore with that beyond this project. The constraint of using a realistic image and transforming it to tell a story gave me a nice boundary within which I felt safe to unleash my creative process. All in all, I feel like I learned a bit more about different mediums and my creative process which I am very happy about.
