CRITICAL THINKING GONE WILD

FRONTAL FRACTURED PORTRAITS

INTERMEDIATE 2-D ART

oil & water pastels, poster board, & various papers

My posting has been pretty eradicate lately.

I apologize,

I've been very distracted

(more on that at a later date).

But I'm going to try harder to get at least 3-4 posts up a week.

That's my goal anyways,

ha!

I'm very excited to share with all of you these gorgeous & creative portraits

done last school year by my 2nd year art students.

The kids were asked to find an interesting frontal portrait from a magazine or the internet,

in color and blown up fairly large so their teacher could see it.

The kids these days want to work off their phones

 and that's just too small for me to see their subjects to be able to help them.

I asked them to fracture these portraits into at least 5 different pieces.

They also had to enlarge the artpiece to at least 16 by 20 inches.

And they could choose to do the work in either oil or water pastel or both.

The students solutions are so well thought out and executed as you will see.

In fact,

the critical thinking in this first one by senior Sarah Oh is beyond creative.

We all loved the way she chose to fracture her work with floating bubbles.

And she asked if she could bring in additional media and I told her to go for it.

I see pen & ink, watercolor, prismacolors, & charcoal.

Sarah, 

I know you check the blog,

did I forget anything?

And then her background complimented the portrait so well.

Do you see the netting she glued down in the backdrop?

And did you notice that her bubbles are going off the edge of the format?

All are wonderful attention to details and just plain great designing.

Bravo young woman!!

Next we have senior Tiffany Chen.

Such a soft, lovely work.

I especially enjoyed the thin rice paper  she cut and glued onto the blue background paper,

makes it even more optical and dimensional.

But my favorite part are the petals of the daisies floating thru the work,

as well as how she built up the dimensional flowers.

I believe she used prismacolors for the value ranges on the petals.

But it was this one that all gravitated to.

It was so different then the others and was the work of senior Mary Kim,

an incredibly gifted artist.

The portrait she drew of her boyfriend was so realistic that we thought it was a photograph.

Here it is below.

She used oil pastel.

Instead of fracturing the face,

Mary chose to fracture the backdrop only,

something that no one had thought to do before.

I so love when the kids give me additional ideas for the future!

I have a give away area of old pieces of art that I don't teach with anymore.

And last year I put out several pieces of demo art that local Fullerton Ca. artist Mary Zarbano

had demonstrated Monoprinting on in the 1980's.

She had done them on thin parchment paper that was yellowing and falling apart.

So Mary plucked them from the pile and fractured and collaged them into her backdrop.

Brilliant idea I thought.

It's so great when the kids can repurpose.