ADVANCED DRAWING: Alter Ego Project

Blog Post 4/7/19

For this project, I really struggled with coming up with a way to execute my ideas for my alter ego onto paper. I started with just a self-portrait, but I was having a hard time coming up with ideas for what to include on the paper. I decided early on that I thought watercolor might be a nice way to so the fluidity of my life to this point. I choose then to use watercolor pencils as a way to keep some control over the use of color throughout the page. For the background of the piece, I took some inspiration from different watercolor artists whose work I have come across in the past. I looked at work by the artist Beverly Brown who specializes in watercolor paintings. I really liked how many of her landscape paintings had a translucent almost barely there feeling about them that I wanted to try to mimic in my own piece. I choose to do a landscape for the background because I wanted to add into the piece a little bit of where I am from. Being from the Pacific North West the landscaping is very different from Southern California. I felt it was important to include a bit of my history in where I grew up in a piece about an alter ego because growing up where I did has shaped me as a person and I felt like it was important, especially in a self-portrait to include a piece of that. Something I have always been interested in in my work is the use of outlines, specifically within the context of layering. In the past, I have used watercolor and black ink to outline a portrait or the watercolor itself to give it an enhanced feeling and some added dimension. I choose to outline my self-portrait using black yarn and glue to symbolize what my hands are doing in the piece which is holding a string puppet. The puppet itself is not visible in the painting because I am meant to be the puppet, this could be interpreted as me standing underneath the piece having the string from my self-portrait’s hands reaching down coming in contact with me, almost as if I myself also become a part of the piece. The string that is used in the piece is a representation of the puppet from which it holds. For the outlining, I took inspiration from the work of Allison Kunath who specializes in blind contour drawings. She uses a pen to blindly draw portraits of people using a contour technique. I really like the look of these types of drawings and thought that something similar might be fitting of my piece which is supposed to represent me. The piece in its entirety is meant to represent me having influence from my original home attempting to have control over me now. My alter ego is the part of me that still belongs there but can’t be while the me now struggles to break free of her grasp (hence the string).