Week 2
Monday - 1/27/2020
Continued to work on a preliminary sketch based on the tumor idea, in which mental illness is taking over the person, this time adding color and playing around with different medium such as pen, colored pencil, and pressed charcoal. I plan to do a bigger version (18x24) for the project.
Thursday - 1/30/2020
Hitting a road block with concepts, I came up with a different angle to portray mental illness. Trying to force confusing metaphor and dwelling too much on the negative aspects and emotions has hindered my progress. Instead, I would like to focus on the now, and how mental illness affects me at certain moments, on my good and bad days. I plan to do portrait and figure paintings that focus more on color, pattern, and brush strokes to evoke emotions in certain settings. I will be looking more into artists that do similar work, but one painter I found for now to look at is Audrey Marienkoff (https://www.artmajeur.com/unka). I'm not sure yet how abstract these paintings will be, time will tell. I plan to start a couple sketches tonight.
At one of my worst points in life a few years ago I discovered the art of mindful meditation. Meditation was one of the key factors that helped me out of that pit. By learning how to manage my thoughts and focusing on how to react to them did it help to keep me from ruminating so much. I haven't kept up with it in a while, but I feel that meditation ties in well with the story I want to tell in my senior project and my battle with mental health issues.
Saturday - 2/1/2020
Continued working on painting sketches for the past couple nights involving more color and using photos of myself as a reference. The thought behind them is moments where mental illness decides to creep up, such - as this first one where anxiety (and back pain) is taking over while working on assignments (this was more for practice, I plan on making changes if I use this sketch later on.)
The second one plays more towards how my PTSD is triggered by simple things such as watching t.v - in this case, I was watching a scene from a show called Bojack Horseman where the character Diane was reliving traumatic moments of her childhood. If you haven't seen this show at all, it hits very hard emotionally and is very apt to set off certain triggers. Mine comes from living with an emotional abusive person after I moved out at 20. I used certain pattern/color relevant to that scene as those emotions hit.
This last sketch I have at the moment is a color concept sketch from the previous pencil sketch from last week. I wanted to represent myself and my self destructive nature I tend to have because of mental health. I used subdued colors to also signify my weariness, etc.
