Bringing faces together.

For this Elective term, I chose to take a class called If These Walls Could Talk. This course gave students a chance to explore the rich history of art, more specifically murals, and we also are given the chance to create some art ourselves. For the second unit of this course, which is called Materialized, we studied all the different materials and spaces that are used for murals. For this second action project the class was separated into 3 groups of 5, and each group had to come up with a design for a mural using the techniques and materials we learned about during the unit. Each person was assigned a portion of the sketch that our group came up with, and experiment with a medium. At the end we all came together to decide which technique would work and look the best for our final mural. It was a bit challenging at first when it came to agreeing on a design for our mural in our group, but at the end we all agreed on something when we realized that we can involve a little bit of everyone’s ideas. I really enjoyed this unit because I didn’t know much about art materials or techniques, so now it’s cool when I see a piece of artwork and I’m able to identify what kind of material or technique was used to create it. I hope you enjoy reading about the design, materials and purpose of our mural below!


RD


Title: Global Collaboration


12-15-2015


Measurement: “11x3.4”, “11x3.4”


Medium:Watercolor paints on canvas paper


The members of my group and I all started to throw ideas at the table, and at first it was rather difficult to come up with an idea on what we wanted our mural to be about. With a little bit of disagreeing and finally agreeing, we were all able to finalize an idea. At the end we finally agreed on the idea of using JR’s Face2Face concept. We loved the idea of taking pictures of our group members and being able to capture some kind of emotion. The first idea that we came up with that went along this concept was having half of all of the 5 group members faces onto one huge canvas, but then we realized that it was a bit too simple. Then we thought about having 3 faces, one using our baby features, another using our features now, and the last one predicting how we would look in the future. It was an interesting idea, but we really weren’t buying it. Finally, we stuck to the idea of having 3 faces, but each one of those faces would portray the emotion of sadness, silliness and happiness. Those emotions would be made up by facial features of the 5 of us.The background is interesting because these 3 faces are being surrounded by Earth. The whole purpose behind this sketch was to represent how GCE students are becoming global citizens, and to also pay tribute to GCE students.

MV, DR, Global Collabration Sketch. 2015

While visualizing this mural in my head, I had the idea of using watercolor to complete it. When I experimented with it in class, it was very simple and easy. I liked that with watercolor, you can easily make your painting detailed or you can go with a very light color and make it a very loose painting. I liked the idea of having the green and blue in the background being very light, but the face being very bold. In my head it looked pretty good. As I was using this medium though, my idea didn’t look so hot. My vision of having the background being covered by a light green and blue looked kind of sloppy, as well as the face being very bold, especially since my group and I decided that we wanted the faces to be black and white.The process was easy, but it wasn’t meant to go with vision of our mural. My group agreed with me that it looked a bit sloppy, which is why we decided not to go with watercolor.

RD. My swatch with watercolor. 2015

RD. My swatch with watercolor. 2015

Once everyone came together with their swatches to choose which medium would be the best, we decided that wheatpaste and mosaic would be the most effective. We liked the way the mosaic gave texture to the background of our future mural. We also discussed how mosaic would add some sparkle to our artwork,which would make it more noticeable.We also realized that wheatpaste would be the easiest to glue our collaged faces.At the end our mural would be the 3 different emotional pictures filled in with the different facial features of the 5 of us, giving it a collage look. The water and land in the back would be displayed my using the mosaic technique, which looked way cooler than the watercolor technique.

MV. Happy face swatch. 2015. 

JV. Wheate paste swatch. 2015