For my family’s paper dolls, I decided to keep them all on the same size scale. Every person in my family holds a great amount of importance, we move together, and we stay in tact. This is also why the members are all strung equally to a clothing hook. Similar to a marionette, when one family moves, the rest of them follow. My family is very close and tightly knit together which is why I chose to display it this way.
This idea correlates to the idea presented in my paper. I told the story of my great-grandfather passing away because it is the story my father told me to teach the importance of keeping the family together before I left for college.
The next part of the dolls I illustrated was each of my family’s personalities. I chose to portray both a realistic and abstract image.
On my parents I painted each one of them black. They tend to be strict and overprotective, so this represents a sort of power or overshadowing they hold. I also made sure to paint it in black with clean strokes to make their skin appear thicker to display that protective layer as well as they like everything to be very simple and straightforward.
For the personalities, I chose to show the polar opposites of my mom versus dad as well as my brother versus me. My dad tends to be on the tech side. He is good with numbers, majored in engineering and management, and loves computers. My mom is a little more laid back, but her side of the family is mostly composed of artists.
The last two personalities are that of my brother and I. Instead of showing our backgrounds, I thought to present how we tend to deal with things. My brother tends to take on a lot of my dad’s traits. He loves math, computer science, video gaming, and fencing. He tends to be very aggressive and swift in situations. To represent this, I used pastel to draw flames of fire. For me, I tend to be a lot more laid back. In situations I take a while to really analyze and think about the situation until I got it perfectly. In harmony to my brother, my personality is a bit more calm which is why I chose the water symbol for myself.
To contrast my brother and I from my parents, I also decided to differentiate the mediums I used in my illustration. For my parents I used paint because when it dries it is clean and doesn’t budge much. Where as my brother and I are still developing and we plenty of mistakes along the way. We also tend to rub off on each other a lot because we are close which is why I used pastel which tends to spread easily.
