Drawing/Imaging: Mark Making and Diptych

Mark Making:

Diptych Sketches:

Final Diptych:

equality/discrimination

statement:

I chose a pair of antonyms: “respect” and “despise”. When I was brainstorming, I found these two words are hard to express by painting but I still want to try. For me, I think that equality represents respect and discrimination represents despise, so I created two panels and each panel represents each word.

At first, I wanted to draw a woman and a man who share the same proportions of the stage to convey the idea of equality on the left panel. For the right panel, I wanted to draw a man who is bigger in size that occupies a larger proportion of the canvas and a smaller woman that occupies a thumbnail proportion of the canvas to convey the idea of discrimination. Then I realized that is too concrete and representative and I wanted to create something more abstract.  I decide to draw flowers and hammers to represent the character of female and male. At last, I just abstracted them into lines and geometric shapes like circle and rectangle.

For the right panel, representing “despise”, I used low key and high contrast because gender discrimination is heavy and important issue. I wanted to draw viewer’s attention by using low key and high contrast. Also, I used  focal point and repetition which are the principles of drawing to attract attention.  I created the image of the hammer is hitting flowers to show that women are being deprive of their own rights.

For the left panel, conveying “respect”, I also used low key and high contrast, but with lower contrast compared than the right panel. I did not paint the whole background black like the right one. Instead, I left it blank because I wanted to create a calm feeling matching the idea of equality and respect. In this painting, the flower part and hammer part share the same proportion of the canvas so they are equal and being respected by the other party. I used design principle of  axis.

My mark making grids helped me draw patterns instead of representative pictures. I do find myself comfortable using ink rather than graphite and collage so I drew my diptych with ink. So far, I learned from Giambattista Tiepolo’s work called Seated River God, Nymph with an Oar, and Putto. I did not realize that drawings can still be so impacted by  high key and low contrast value shifts.

Reflection:

At first, I found it is hard for me to think up any ideas that I want to draw. After these two projects I have done, I think I am kind of getting on the right track now because it does not take me as much time as before. Also, I found myself comfortable working with ink instead of graphite and collages and I always know what I want to draw if I am using ink. And even if I am not good at drawing, I can still draw some cool patterns with ink. What’s more, it is an improvement for me to learn how to use value and contrast to show the emotion of drawings. It will be a good idea that make patterns on fabrics.