There are three ways to create a portrait: traditional, abstract, and a combination. Traditional portraiture is constructed based on what the artist actually sees. Abstract portraiture is constructed based on what the artist feels. A combination of the two is an emotionally beautiful piece; a perfect mixture of reality and imagination. In studio, Fernando combines traditional and abstract portraiture. He portrays Fia in a traditional style portrait, while portraying himself abstractly with inkblots. His explanation of why he chooses to have this strip effect creates a stunning, intimate narrative. Portraiture can also be two- or three-dimensional and used in various mediums.
In my experience, I struggled more with the self-portrait than with the peer-portrait. For some reason, self-portraiture seemed to be challenging because it’s hard to explain myself into one piece of art. With the peer-portrait, it was easy for me to use the small knowledge that I have of Albert into one piece. Working with image and text was also challenging for me because I believed that image and text should be separated. In my opinion, text distracts from the image itself and sometimes does not translate well into a piece. I attempted to find a way to make the text a separate piece through a social media page. However, while in critique, I realized that I could have made something better. For the midterm, I wanted to redo the peer-to-peer assignment by incorporating a more meaningful and “glitchy” version of the text. Before I decided on the social media page idea, I wrote down some words and phrases that I remembered in my conversations with Albert. I was going to use the collage of words, and I probably will for the midterm redo.
I worked around the task of using eight pieces of 18×24 paper by digitally stripping them down. I used 20 8×10 photographs and two 18×24 photographs. The two 18×24 photographs were used as my background, as well as the 20 cropped 8×10 photographs in photoshop. Below is a picture of my math (just to prove that I fulfilled the requirement). The 2.3 panels left were what I used in the text portion of the assignment.
Because I felt unsuccessful with the text portion of the peer-to-peer assignment, I made two new 30×24 pieces of “glitchy” text. In the pieces, I inserted excerpts from my and Albert’s “I Remembers”, and– using Illustrator– I created a single blocked line and repeated it to create a very subtle portrait. The text was written in white because I wanted to have the text glitching too. Some letters were masked in the white gaps of the portrait, however the eye understood what the word should be.