Exoskeleton

We had a "large" painting assignment for Adv. Painting and I had always wanted to paint on a dress form. Luckily for me, Darshana (another painter) had a dress form she was trying to find a home for. This fits in with the rest of the Body Modification series and is supposed to evoke the idea of a wrought iron and (frosted) glass exoskeleton to encase organs. I abstracted the view of the organs themselves because it wouldn't be especially appealing to see kidneys and mammary glands but I did use the metal to mirror the muscles and skeleton of the body. In the front there is the ribcage, sternum, abs, etc. and in the back: spine, pelvis, and shoulder blades. I'm tempted to go back in with 3 dimensional aspects but for the assignment I kept it painted only.
I think the hardest part of this was putting the gesso on. There was this fuzzy felt, jersey fabric covering the adjustable plastic form so I had to get past that in order to get a relatively smooth surface. This was easier said than done. Each layer took forever to dry and started to crack in places. Sanding it was also a pain and I'm fairly certain I have a nice cakey layer of gesso on the inside of my lungs now ^.^;;. Oh well. Stapling the skirt on the bottom wasn't especially easy but I think it gives the overall piece a nice finished look and ties it back in to the sheath dresses from the other paintings in the series.

This was on display with the rest of my class's response to the assignment at the Colburn Gallery at Williams Hall.


In other news, the majority of construction is now done. Unfortunately, tumblr has been down for the past few days which has been a hindrance but I'm pretty pleased with my results. Please check them out! ^.^

Class Gallery Showing

I have another big (!) piece for the Body Mod series in the works but you'll have to wait on that. In the meantime, my Adv. Drawing course is working on our "Project of a project" series and we were given the chance to display our works in progress in the Colburn Gallery in Williams Hall. I set my space up as a storyboarding note-taking situation, sketching and writing notes on the wall next to my thumbnails and photocopies of the finished pages. As usual, I got a lot of slack for my work being illustrative (since when is that not "art" anyway?!) and for not being pretentious enough (I'm paraphrasing) but I'm proud of it so nyah nyah.Not a whole lot there to look at, I know, but each one of those watercolored sheets takes between 6 and 10 hours to do so this project isn't exactly something I can crank out in a night.

P.S. HUGE news! There's apparently a large flatbed scanner in the Special Collections area of my college's library that I have complete access to! I think it deserves a visit as soon as possible.