ADVANCED DRAWING: Mail Art

Ali Sykes

ART 318—Advanced Drawing

Mail Art Blog Post

My whole life, I have felt like I have two different art styles, one for animation and one for fine arts. I came into Chapman as an animation major because I loved creating characters in a somewhat Disney cartoon style. Pernille Ørum, who has been my favorite illustrator for as long as I can remember, and Glen Keane both heavily influence my animation style. This style is very different from my detailed, perfectionist fine arts style. While my animation style is a way of drawing that is very fun for me and allows me to be creative in a different way, I never really considered it to be appropriate in a fine arts setting. My first time introducing this other creative side of me into a fine arts setting was for the document of existence project. This project made me really exited because it was so fun for me to do, and made me desperate to have this much fun with other projects. This was honestly the first time I ever really considered the fact that my character doodles could be incorporated into actual art.

So, when the Mail Art project was assigned, I knew I wanted to do something that was fun for me to draw, and allowed me to develop my style and understanding as an artist at the same time, so I chose to do portraits somewhat influenced by my animation style. I wanted to merge these two styles further, though, and apply my line work and marker media (which are staples of my animation style) to a realistic portrait subject matter. I thought a lot of Andy Warhol’s colorful silk-screen portraits, specifically his Marilyn Monroe pieces, when I was brainstorming and constructing my own pieces. His block-style, bright color portraits were definitely a big inspiration for my own pieces. When doing research for this project and searching all types of portraits, I found portraits by Chris Legaspi and James Gurney to be very influential. I liked the idea of using a limited color palette to create cohesion. I created my own color palettes for the majority of my pieces in the Mail Art series, but a few were inspired by palettes I was drawn to online. I found a really awesome site toward the end of my project that just has a bunch of color palettes that was just fun to look through.

A particular decision I chose to incorporate in my pieces was making the skin and hair colors of each portrait unnatural colors. I made this decision to add a feel of ambiguity as to the race and ethnicity of the portraits. I thought this would be an interesting concept, and would allow each piece to have a really different look and feel. I feel as if this is somewhat of a personal protest to the idea of the color “nude” or “skin tone,” because that is not just a single color, and in my case, means anywhere from bright pink to navy blue.

Images