James Turrell is an artist my partner recommended to help guide what my project was going to entail. His work is very simple yet poetic.
Richard Johnson
Richard is another artist I used in my persona project. This had to do with my partners fear because when she was a little girl she was harassed and bullied.
</a>http://artofmiami.com/2012/06/18/miami-artist-jean-paul-mallozzi-tackles-the-issue-of-bullying-thru-his-art/
SKETCHES
All these sketches have something to do with bullying and the story behind my partners fear. I wanted to exaggerate what I was making, something the viewers would notice. I came up with many ideas but non met the expectations I wanted. I thought about drawing a hand squeezing lungs so people would know what it meant, the expression of “I can’t breathe” or “Help me”. All of these things came into play, after a while I came up with a conclusion and decided to make something entirely made out of cardboard. Cardboard is sturdier than paper and doesn’t rip easily, lastly it also needed to be colorful.
PROTOTYPES
I started off making something that would look feminine because my partner was a girl. I wanted to make something colorful and vibrant to grab the audiences attention. The first prototype took me a fair amount of time and it was just about 6 inches. I knew the real model would take me a long time to make and since this project is entirely made out of paper I wouldn’t be able to make something conformable for my partner. I wanted to make something that fit but fit conformably. Both of these ideas/prototypes failed but along came a better one, with that said making the prototypes helped me come up with exactly what I wanted to make.
MODEL
My partners fear was of getting bullied when she was a child. What I made her looks like some type of armor or vest in order to be protected, which was what I intended. This body armor was made to make my partner feel safe and strong. It’s colorful because when she was a little girl nobody noticed what she was going through nor cared. I wanted to use bright colors and sharp shapes to capture how she felt. In the front there are patterns of triangles in many different colors. There are also four 3D triangles I glued on to give the piece more meaning, structure, and character. In the back I used one of the artists work my partner recommended to me by James Turrell. This piece in covered in shapes and colors to both protect and to attract.
