Process
For this piece, I thought a lot about memory and people I have lost. I decided to create this piece as a memorial to my Uncle Steve, who passed away in 2014. I decided to use family pictures to portray his life before I was born, and in so I created a series that illustrates memories that I do not have. The three pictures I chose all have significance to my Uncle and my family. The first picture is of my Uncle Steve and Uncle Stewart in a dogwood tree in 1967. This photograph was my grandmother's favorite picture of her sons, and Dogwoods were her favorite flower. The second picture is of my Uncle Steve when he joined the 82nd Airborn in 1981 when he was 17 years old. The third photo is of my two brothers and Uncle Steve in a playset he built in our backyard in 2004. This picture was taken right before I was born in January of that year. The piece of string wrapped around the images is crocheted and attached to a replica of his dog tags that my mother received after his death.
Materials
For this project, I used my own sketchbook paper, which is Strathmore Mixed Media paper. I cut the images down to size and then cut the paper so I could paste it onto another piece so I could make the pieces look like poloroids. For the central person in each drawing, Steve, I used a mixture of Ebony, mechanical, and Turquoise pencils. For the other people and the background, I used watercolors. I decided to make my Uncle black and white to portray the sense of loss that my family felt after his death -- like a piece is missing from our lives. For the dog tags, I also used sketchbook paper which I cut out and pasted onto another piece of shaded paper. I cut a hole in it with an Exacto knife. I make the chain for the dog tags from crocheted Yarnspirations Bernat Bundle Up yarn in the color Marshmellow. After crocheting the chain, I dyed it in black acrylic ink so it would not by such a stark contrast to the rest of the image. Finally, I wrote the descriptions of the images below the "Poloirods" I created.
Struggles
There were two main struggles that I encountered during this piece. The first one was accuratly portraying my Uncle. I struggled with capturing his expression and making him look "human." I struggled with this because I needed to practice drawing humans more often. The second struggle I had during this process was my own feelings and grief surrounding these images.
Comments