sorry mom, love you!

I am no stranger to layers and lowering their opacity. Almost all of the digital art I've made includes a ton of layers that people don't see in the final piece. For my piece this week, I decided to make a collage of multiple images. I layered a bunch of baby pictures of me over a youthful image of my mom.  I lowered the opacity of all them to around 50 to mimic what is written about by Lupton, "To make any image transparent involves compromising its intensity, lowering its overall contrast" (162). 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CG_wdNVndQy/

I can't really tell you what this image means. If I can get a little transparent on my blog, my mom has been on my mind recently since we had an argument. We're in the middle of resolving it because I know I just cannot hold a grudge against my mom at all. She has an explosive personality that you would not pick up from the initial image or the images overlayed on this one. I love sharing this image around of my mom because I think she looks adorable. It's one of the only ones we have from her youth in Mexico. Funnily enough, although she doesn't like me sharing this single image, she loves sharing all the baby pictures she has of me. My relationship with my mom has recently become strained due to the simple fact that I'm not the little girl in the pictures anymore. She doesn't do my hair or dress me because I have a different way of wanting to express myself now. It hurts her a little bit that I'm growing I think. At least she has the photos to always look back on and reminisce!

i don't know how to frame

"The philosopher Jacques Derrida defined framing as a structure that is both present and absent" (117). I tried doing this in by using the fog around the boy as a sort of frame. It's kind of a subtle frame. It's not in your face like the thick outer edge border ones. I decided to use watercolor since I feel watercolor really isn't a medium that allows itself to be easily framed?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGtkn_WHgHf/

I definitely think this quote: "Written language becomes a frame for the image" (121) would have been useful if I had added any words to this image! For example, if it said pandemic on the mask then it'd be very specific to our current world. Or the word "tired" could definitely be an expression of just how the person is currently feeling. I'm hoping the juxtaposition between dark and muted colors versus the bright yellow helps frame what people get out of this piece. This pandemic sucks; I think we can all agree on that. The person's mask is yellow, a brighter color, so maybe when someone else sees them on the street they go "oh hey! my favorite color, nice!" Even if the world sucks, there is still positivity in the little things and during this time I think we have to try harder to focus on the small things.

eyes eyes and more eyes

 Lupton comments twice on eyes when talking about the way our features exemplify properties such as symmetry. He makes these two comments: "Blocking the eyes can create emotional tension" (100) and "The blocked eyes produce a sense of psychological erasure" (101). In the two pieces I share, I didn't block either of the eyes. What I did want to come across is the property of symmetry and the second one with the upside down eyes is just for fun? 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGbMlSZHlzU/

The eyes themselves in the first image aren't close enough to be actual eyes on someone's face. Not that they need to be to show off symmetry. I'd say the last pair of eyes probably closely reflects what mine look like currently. Tired. What kinds of eyes do you have? 

As we near the middle of the term, I hope everyone takes care of themselves. It's easy to exhaust ourselves remotely - be at campus or not.

serenity

 I went to the park today. I was sitting around with a friend, talking and listening to music. The world has been relentlessly lately. It feels like it just doesn't stop. There's no pause button on it ever and all the good days are getting confused for the bad ones. I looked at the sky and tried to recreate the colors I saw in it. As Lupton writes, "Including both warm and cool hues in a color palette creates a sense of visual completeness, like a salad with a full range of flavors and textures" (Lupton, 90). The sky today was setting with cool blues on the top and lots of pretty oranges and light pinks towards the area where it was setting. All the colors are  dulled out a bit since I want to convey a sense of peace with this drawing. The "wind" is blowing softly and sky is setting. You can come up with whatever this person is listening to. Maybe some soft piano? The character in the front is only flat colors since I wanted the softness of the sky to come through from the background.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGNWsZbHfZX/

You can tell the drawing is a little outdated since the earbuds are wired. I wanted to keep them wired since it definitely helps show that the "wind" is blowing. I think the person looks at peace and is feeling a sense of calm in these overwhelming times.

balanced?

It's October! Every day is Halloween now. To exemplify what we read in our chapters, I decided to rip a symmetrical looking pumpkin out of a page and fill the background with repeated rounded shapes. Lupton wrote, "In design, balance acts as a catalyst for form -- it anchors and activates elements in space" (49). The background here fills up all of the negative space. The pumpkin in the middle helps anchor the image down. 

To quote from the text again, "A design whose elements all have a similar size often feels dull and static, lacking contrast in scale" (61). All the shapes in the background vary in size. They also have the same shapes inside but sized differently. There isn't much change in terms of scale of the pumpkin. It would've been cool to carve it out maybe but I wanted to draw a pumpkin by itself!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CF3gWs5HBMf/