Introduction
In this project, we are asked to work with our partner on our books. We draw our places on our own books then trade with our partner to draw our self portrait. The final step is to integrate our works together and create a pop-up space by using paper cutting techniques. I will introduce how we make our project step by step in the following post.
Step 1
Draw my places on each page of my book. The place can be any place in my imagination, any place I have been to and any place that in important to me.
Step 2
I was supposed to trade my book with my partner Asia and draw my self portrait on my partner’s book, to create a interaction between my place and her portrait, her place and my portrait, just like doing a exquisite corpse. However, Asia was sick and we live really far apart from each other, so we drew our self portrait on our own books. We are doing exquisite corpse with ourself. I think it makes our work kind of interesting and different from others because we are given the opportunity to look at our own work, rethink our idea, and do something different and creative to our work. This is a process to communicate with ourselves and talk to ourselves by rearrange our works.
Also, we are encouraged to draw our self portrait in different styles. I simply think this is a good way to explore more possibilities of drawing and get to know more about ourselves by making abstraction, distortion, simplification…
Step 3
Take one page from each of our books and combine them. Fold them into halves, stick them together, and try do do some pop-up effects by creating different paper cutting patterns. The professor provided us many examples of how to make a pop-up effect and they really inspired me. I carefully look at my partner’s work and I appreciate her work very much. Although our style is completely different, we still find something in common in our works and I think its so interesting in the creation of art that we can came up with similar idea but present it in different ways. That’s why the world of art is so diverse. We stick our works that are strongly connected or largely differentiate together to form a sense or similarity or contrast. The similarity and contrast can be in tone, color, pattern, theme, composition and etc.
We basically cut our paper base on the original shape we drew to make the whole artwork more coherent and we can also emphasis the things we strongly wanted to express in our work. Also, making our work from 2D to 3D strengthens the sense of depth in our work. The sense of “shift” is being presented in our work. It’s not only a shift of space and people, but also a shift of idea and an integration of idea.
Final Work
The final work should be attached to a large piece of bristol paper. Since all our works are in rectangular shape, we chose to align it in a neat and clear order, to make it look well-organized.
