Collection of media over the Semester

This project was inspired by our personal collection of pictures and articles over the semester. Focusing on the theme of ‘People’, we observed people and space at several places in New York City namely, Times Square, the NYU led protests at Washington Square Park, the Foley Square Protest and other such public spaces. We also observed people closely in texts like The Citizen by Claudia Rankine and The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood, and newspaper articles. We then picked about 5 pictures of people that interested us in particular at the end of the semester to work with.

 

Sketching  people from the media collection

We drew sketches of those 5-6 people in our sketchbooks.

Finalizing the sources for the portrait

We then selected our final subjects and sources for our final portraits. I chose to work with Laura Mvulas pictures I collected from the newspaper. The idea I set off with was the portrait of this Afro-american musician keeping in mind the concept of the text we read in class ( The Citizen, by Claudia Rankine) .

 

newspaper clippings

portrait sketches

Making a collage out of the sources

I then wanted to create a collage out of the black and white sketches juxtaposed to all the colors and patterns I saw in the original article pictures. I wanted to represent this colored woman with all due respect and in the different ways I saw her in the two distinctly different pictures. I made several digital layouts on Photoshop and finally settled on one.

    

(final layout)

Final Portrait

Ultimately, the final portrait was made on a sheet sized 28″ x 40″. I drew the portrait with help of  charcoal, pencils and erasers and  lastly collaged the patterns and colors onto the drawing.