Thursday, March 17, 2011

Foreign City Experience Illustrations (Charrette)

Last week in studio we took a break from working on our Capstone projects and got to do a one week project on pretty much whatever we wanted to. I chose to make to paintings illustrating the my experience as a visitor in two different cities and how different the two experiences were. I chose my visits Istanbul with my sister, and Budapest with my friend, Emily. The two trips were both amazing, but completely opposite experiences! These two paintings took aprx. 17 hours to complete (and probably gave me arthritis).

Here is my painting set-up once I had the illustrations drawn—so neat and clean!


Here is the process, from drawing to painting, of making the pattern that represents my experience in Istanbul (explanation comes later).




And here is the final Istanbul illustration! The intricate part of the pattern on the left is based on a hand-painted tiled wall in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The pattern starts out intricate and detailed on the left—because we came to Istanbul with a full, detailed itinerary with everything planned down to the hour—but the pattern simplifies down to the basics as it progresses to the right—because we learned quickly to adopt and change our itinerary, at times even abandoning it!


Here is the process, from drawing to painting, of making the pattern that represents my experience in Budapest.




And here is the final Budapest illustration! This pattern is based on the shingles on the roof of the Fisherman's Bastille in Budapest and represents the naive wandering that made up my experience in Budapest. Emily and I went to Budapest with no knowledge of what we should see while there, and hence had no itinerary! We wandered around the city streets looking at everything until we turned a corner and bumped into a special surprise location that we excitedly explored!


I adored this project and wish I could do more like it. I always forget how happy painting makes my little heart! It's really the times I feel most purposeful. Maybe once I've graduated I can spend more time drawing and painting since I won't have all these other projects and homework sucking up my creativity and time!

CAM Museum Posters

Last week during work at CAM I printed out posters that New Kind designed for CAM to cover the windows of the museum while they put up the exhibitions. I spent 5 hours printing out eighteen 43 x 126 inch posters, and accumulated 12 paper cuts! My blood and soul went into those posters! Not really though, don't be grossed out...





Ooooh yeeeah. It's gonna be good.