Alter Ego Project
This project was really interesting to me because I have never tackled a drawing that is this large. At first I wanted to take the idea of the drawing and split it into two drawings, One of me and one of my alter ego. This would make the drawings smaller, easier to tackle, and I thought more interesting. I played with this idea, but I had trouble deciding what my alter ego would be and also how I would draw it. I ultimately decided not to pursue the two drawings as separate pieces for two reasons. Firstly, I thought it would be challenging to tackle a drawing that needed to be 3 feet by 4 feet and needed to be completed in roughly three weeks. Secondly, I thought the concept of an alter ego would be better portrayed through one piece instead of two. The next challenge that I faced with this drawing was actually portraying my alter-ego. I wanted to find a way to portray my alter-ego that was both meaningful to me and visually engaging. I first played with the idea of doing different animals and I soon settled on a choice between three; a panther, a tiger, or a cheetah. Thinking about these animals and how I could draw them I was reminded of tattoos, specifically traditional tattoos. The tattoo idea fascinated me because I have always been drawn to tattoos, I have one and plan on getting more, so it seemed like a fitting way to display my alter ego.
Once I had my idea, a large cat tattoo, I began planning how I would draw it out on my sheet of paper. With the idea of wanting to do a tattoo I wanted the image to be large and therefore I needed a lot of space on the body. I decided that the back would be the best place for the tattoo, giving me the best place on the body to put a large and also possibly detailed tattoo. Based on this placement for the tattoo I had to draw the back of the figure and I would need to draw the figure portrait style on the paper rather than landscape.
For this drawing I also wanted to push myself in which mediums I used for this piece. Given that the drawing is four feet by three feet I wanted to make sure that I managed my time well by choosing a medium that would allow me to complete the drawing in the given time. I decided that ink and watercolor were mediums that I had never really fully used before and would also be helpful in completing the drawing within my time constraint. For this drawing I wanted to focus heavily on the tattoo, representing my alter-ego. I wanted to do the tattoo in ink because I felt that that was an interesting parallel to actual tattoos and the tattoo ink. I felt this would also help the tattoo stand out against the water color. Since i have not used watercolor very often I didn’t want to do the entire figure in water color. I chose to do the background in watercolor and use prismacolor pencils for the figure. Since the tattoo would be mostly black as it is a panther, and the figure would be oranges/red tones because of the skin color, I decided that the background should be mostly blues and purples. I wanted to try to make the background interesting and complimentary, but not distracting from the main point of the piece, the tattoo of my alter-ego. This project was relatively daunting, but I think that through planning, and experimentation, I was able to create a piece that is visually interesting, is a good representation of my alter-ego, and pushed my skills working with new mediums.
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