SUMMER PROJECT 1 |
Title: Karen Girls
Size: 50.6 x 38.1 cm Medium: Color pencils and Watercolor Completion: August 7, 2023 EXHIBITION TEXT
The title “Karen Girls” represents the three girls drawn on the illustration board. It shows what Karen girls are by presenting the different cultural clothing from the Karen culture. Each girl represents three different generations of Karen girls. The flower and the praying hand drawn represents which religion they believe in, which would represent Buddhism. The writing in the art piece is the name of the artist as this piece also would represent her culture, ethnicity, and religion. The writing in the art piece shows what Karen's letter and word looks like.
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INSPIRATION
INSPIRATION: Kitagawa Utamaro
The way Kitagawa Utamaro uses extremely fine, detailed techniques in his artwork really drew me in and motivated me. His style and structure really made his artwork look unique, and his approach appeared to be quite clean. I was drawn to his artwork because of the incredible way he uses each art element. I appreciate how nicely he was able to merge the artistic element and how he used it to highlight the painting itself. He mostly utilized the art elements of line, color, space, and texture.Every part of those elements were used very, it’s what made me inspired. His work influenced and inspired me a lot to do my piece. When I saw his work, it made me immediately think of what kind of art I wanted to do for my piece. Even though the medium is different, the way he used his technique and the way he drew inspired me to want to incorporate elements from his work into my own piece, which I will be creating. The first thing I thought of when I saw what kind of art style he uses and what kinds of pieces he creates is that I should do an illustration type of piece. The first time I’ve heard of him was when I saw his artwork in a text book named “The Courtesan Hanaogi of ogiya”, that was the first piece I saw and I was really drawn to it. When I saw that piece that’s when I knew I wanted to created a piece that was inspired by him. The way he was able to replicate the model face and posture was nicely well done. Sometimes it's more difficult to recreate a model posture, particularly during the edo era when there wasn't much technology. Despite the fact that some of the models he uses may move a lot since it's difficult to keep still, I was impressed by how beautifully and accurately he does his paintings. Another artwork of his, "Three beauties of the Kwansei Period," also served as inspiration for me to create a piece of art that was somewhat like his but not exactly like his. The majority of the women he drew shared a similar expression, but they were usually looking in different directions, which gave his artwork a distinctive appearance. “Three beauties of the Kwansei Period”, was one of his unique art piece he made where all the models were facing a different direction and looking at something else, I thought that this was unique since it makes every model he choose to paint stand out in their own different ways.I particularly enjoyed how he bolded and outlined the "The Courtesan Hanaogi of Ogiya" and "Three beauties of the Kwansei Period" in his artwork using black paint, which let each element and feature stand out.The girls' traditional dress, features, and even the black outline really contest each detail and feel. The bold outline makes them unique in their own way and it really inspired me to create an artwork that I would enjoy doing.
PLANNING
For the first part of planning I was thinking of either deciding to draw three girls or one girl. After some thinking I decided I want to go with drawing three girls so it can have a better representation of the Karen (kuh-ren) people and tradition. I wanted three girls to show different unique styles of clothing. For this planning I chose to draw one of the girls. I decided I wanted to position the person on the top and position in the middle. In the initial planning, I also considered the type of traditional clothing I wanted to depict the person in, so I looked online to see if there were any other options for Karen clothing for girls except the ones I already own. I saw some outfit and wanted to incorporate cultural clothing into my design after getting some inspiration from it. I decided that I wanted to create a dress, and the colors that sprang to mind were red, purple, black, etc. I gave it one last look after I finished drawing the females and their attire to see if I needed to make any adjustments or add anything else. Once I took one more look, I thought maybe I should add an accessory on the girl and after that everything was complete.
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For the second planning phase I drew both the second and third girl. For the girl I drew on the very first top of the page I wanted to position her on the left side of the first girl that I drew in plan 1. For the girl I drew on the bottom I wanted to place her on the right side. The girls that I drew on this page I thought of drawing them from different generations like one from the modern days and one from back in the day like an older version of the younger one. After drawing what they looked like I wanted to draw Karen traditional clothing just like the one I did in the first planning, but with a different style of clothing look that defines each of the girls. I drew the traditional clothing for which best suits them. For this planning and the first planning I didn’t use any model since I just want to freestyle draw to see how it goes and I thought that went pretty well. I felt like the outcome of the planning went well and I thought the sketches were pretty decent and I was able to represent my culture/ethnicity pretty well.
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The last part of planning I drew what I wanted to have for the background of my painting. The first drawing I did was a traditional Karen head scarf and this wasn't necessarily apart of the background, but I drew that to see if I wanted to draw in on one of the person that I drew. For the second part of the drawing that isn’t also for the background I drew a necklace as one of the accessories I wanted to draw on one of the girls. The two sketch I drew on the bottom are the ones that I wanted to incorporate in the background of the art piece I will be creating. Both of the drawings represent my religion. The flower I drew symbolizes Buddhism and for the praying hand it represents what we do when we start praying. When there's a monk starts praying me and my family would also put our hand together like the one in the drawing and start praying. We also pray like this even without the monk. By drawing these it represents my family, culture, and religion.
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PROCESS/EXPERIMENT
I did color one of the planning sketch faces to which skin color would look better for the final artwork and I also traced around the sketch to see the drawing would stand out.
For the first part of planning I decided to draw the first girl that I drew in the first part of my planning. I first started off with drawing a random circle just to see where I would be drawing. I then drew her in the middle of the illustration board that I have. I also chose to leave some room to be able to fit what I wanted to draw in the background. Once I was done with drawing the circle I then drew the eye first, then the nose and then the lips/mouth. After I was done drawing all the facial features on the girl I then decided to draw and outline the shape of the head. Once I was done drawing the girl's head and face features I decided to look over what I drew and I didn’t really like the outcome of my drawing and so I decided to redraw the girl for the second time to get it to the way I like it. After a few tries I finally liked the outcome of my drawing and I thought it looked pretty decent. Once the drawing was done I then drew the traditional Karen clothing.
After finishing the first component of my work I later on drew the two girls I had in my second planning pages and drew it onto the illustration board. The first girl I drew was the younger girl I had from plan 2 and I decided to draw her on the left side of my drawing. When I drew the second girl I wanted to have her look down on the left so that it was a little similar to the way Kitagawa created his artwork of the “Three beauties of the Kwansei period”. Once I was done drawing the girl I didn’t really like the outcome. I thought it looked a little weird and it wasn’t looking like the second planning page I drew of her. Since I didn’t really like the drawing of the girl I then decided to erase it and redrew it again the second time. The second time I drew it, it looked better than the first time and after drawing the girl I then moved on to draw the third girl which is the older lady. When I drew the third lady I thought it looked pretty decent and I didn’t have to draw it the second time. Once I was done drawing both girls I then drew the traditional Karen clothing for both of them.
Once I completed drawing all three of the girls I decided to move on to the background. Drawing the background didn’t take me that long and I was pretty happy with the outcome. The first thing I did for the background was adding a border for each of the drawings. After outlining the border I then drew the elements I wanted in the background which were the praying hands and the flowers.
For the accessories that I had in mind are not drawn on here since I thought it wouldn’t suit the drawing.
After completing every element and components that I had for the piece I then went ahead and outlined every part of the drawing I drew on the illustration board with black color pencils.
Once I was done outlining the drawing I then went ahead and picked out the color pencils I was going to use to color some part of the drawing. The first thing I did when I had prepared my color pencils was coloring in the hand that I drew. I started with part since it won’t take me very long and after coloring in the hand I then moved onto the second part of the background which was the flowers. I had the same reason as to why I started coloring in the flowers second and it was because it wouldn’t take me that long to color.
After coloring in the background I then moved onto coloring the three girls. I first started off with coloring the face and I didn’t use that much color because just like Kitagawa artwork he also didn’t use a lot of color for the model he drew. After coloring the face I then moved onto the traditional clothing.
I only colored on some parts of the traditional clothing since for the rest of the clothing I wanted to paint by using watercolors. I thought using both watercolors and color pencils would make it look better.
After using the color pencils to color some parts I then went ahead to paint the rest of the illustration with color pencils. The first part I decided to paint in with color pencils was the background of the hand. The color I chose for the praying hand background was gray and I chose that color because I thought it would make the hand stand out a little bit more. Once I was done painting the praying hand background I then went ahead to paint the flower background. For the background of the flower the color I chose to paint was similar to the colors of the flower and so the color I chose for the background was a red-orange color.
Once I was done painting the background for both the hand and the flower I decided to paint the traditional clothing that didn’t have any color. Once I was done painting the clothing I then moved on to painting the background of the whole piece and the color I chose for the background was a peach color. I chose that color for the background because I thought it would suit the look of the piece but also make the girls I drew stand since all of them basically kind of have bold color clothing that makes them stand out in their own way.
After I was done with everything I then let everything dry and once everything was dry I went to check how everything turned out. I wanted to check how everything turned out because I wanted to see if I needed to make any changes. After looking at everything, I decided to make some changes and once I made those changes I let everything dry.
This is how my art piece turned out
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The name of my art piece is called “Karen Girls” and I chose that title since the girls in this piece are all Karen girls, they represent the Karen community. As you can see in this painting I drew each girl facing a different direction and wearing different clothing because I wanted each of the girls to stand out in their own way. Another reason why I drew a different traditional clothing and had different colors was because I wanted to show the different types of clothing we had and I wanted to present what our culture is. Besides the girls drawn there I also drew a praying hand along with a flower to represent Buddhism as it is my religion. I made this piece because I wanted to do something that would represent me and my culture. I wanted to show other people my culture since my ethnicity is not very well known. I created this piece to let others know more about my culture and my people. The writing here also represents my culture as it is a writing in my language and the direct translation of that word is my name.
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REFLECTION
I thought my work looked really well, but it could have been better. The purpose of my art project is to represent my culture and religion. I said it may have been better since sometime I would smear the painting unintentionally, which gave it a little off-center appearance. I also didn’t liked how in some part of the clothing was colored. I believed that the colors and drawing in certain areas were uneven and looked wrong. One thing that I did learn and won’t make the same mistake is using a ruler to measure things more correctly so that things can look more even. I’ve also learned that before coloring I should plan to see which color would work best with the drawing. If I were to do this again I would have a separate drawing and I would color it just to see which one would look better so that way I don’t have any mistakes for my final artwork. Another thing I will do next time is having even measurements so that way things won’t look off. Overall, I think the process was good, and I felt like I was able to portray and represent my people and culture properly in this piece by showcasing who we are and what some of us believe in.
CRITIQUE
DIFFERENCES
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SIMILARITIES
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CONNECTION TO ACT QUESTION
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause-effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
The cause of my inspiration was the way the artist has created their piece and the way everything looks neat and precisely well done. Every aspect of the work was very detailed and the artist was also able to present their culture which had an effect on my piece - making me want to do something similar.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The overall approach regarding the topic of my inspiration was to create something that represents me and who I am and how much I appreciate my culture.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
While researching my inspiration I saw that many artists come from different cultures and they present their culture in unique ways.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The central theme around my inspiration research is culture and identity. I wanted to create something that represents me and my culture.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
The inferences I made while reading and looking at my research is culture. I wanted to show others what culture is about, especially from my own culture.
The cause of my inspiration was the way the artist has created their piece and the way everything looks neat and precisely well done. Every aspect of the work was very detailed and the artist was also able to present their culture which had an effect on my piece - making me want to do something similar.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The overall approach regarding the topic of my inspiration was to create something that represents me and who I am and how much I appreciate my culture.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
While researching my inspiration I saw that many artists come from different cultures and they present their culture in unique ways.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The central theme around my inspiration research is culture and identity. I wanted to create something that represents me and my culture.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
The inferences I made while reading and looking at my research is culture. I wanted to show others what culture is about, especially from my own culture.
CITATION
IN MLA FORMAT
“Kitagawa Utamaro.” The Art Institute of Chicago, www.artic.edu/artists/37074/kitagawa-utamaro.
Dieter Wanczura. “Utamaro Kitagawa.” Artelino.com, artelino GmbH, 28 July 2001, www.artelino.com/articles/utamaro.asp.
Dieter Wanczura. “Utamaro Kitagawa.” Artelino.com, artelino GmbH, 28 July 2001, www.artelino.com/articles/utamaro.asp.