Self-Portrait Blog

Self-Portrait - Chuck Close

Close used oil on canvas to create this large image of himself.  I have included a photo that shows what he actually does when creating these pieces of art.  You can see how he places a bar on the photograph and does the same on the canvas; he basically uses a grid.  He does a unique way of showing who he is to the audience.  His “identity” is used through grid work and a futuristic point of view.

Marilyn - Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol started the PopArt era.  He showed the world a totally different type of art.  Here he used a photo of Marilyn and fooled with the coloring.  Warhol really started a new age of art and let others find a different way of expressing their art abilities.

Cut - Kara Walker

Even though Walker uses cutouts for her artwork, this is something that could be done in illustrator.  I would just use the pen tool and pretty much draw the image wanted and fill it with black.  I like Walker’s pieces of art because each of them has their own story.  Some of them are pretty intense images.  I used a simple one for this  

Self Portrait

Paul Jacoulet (1902 - 1960) designed a remarkable set of woodblock prints, this one being apart of the Pacific Exotic. They are beautifully composed, visually exciting, and masterfully produced. I think his woodblock prints could be remade in Illustrator because of its cartoonist look and its fun colors. I like this picture because it synthesize Japanese and French aesthetics and the work that goes into woodblock prints.

This piece was done by Salvador Dali, called “Galatea of the Spheres.” He painted it is 1952 to reflect what he was writing about in his book “Mystic Manifest.” The spheres show general order to the universe and to humans. I love how he portrays the lady in this painting. He makes her look very peaceful and at peace with the world, especially when he has the sky and sea behind her.

This is one of many self-portraits Frieda Kahlo’s painted called “Self-Portraits with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.” Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art - paintings which exalted the feminine quality of truth, reality, cruelty and suffering. Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time. You can just look into her eyes and see the unhappiness she lived in. Also, the thorns around her neck express a lot of suffering and pain.

Kayla Kaser- Historical Self Portraits

A) “Self Portrait with Camouflage 1986” By: Andy Warhol. I’m not quite sure how Warhol is trying to represent himself here or if he even knew, but the camouflage could represent a number of things: he’s trying to ‘blend in’ with his work, he is his work, he is a introvert and doesn’t want to stand out or be noticed, he maybe feels like he gets too much attention and wishes he didn’t, I could go on and on here. However, Warhol’s signature wig that he wore in this picture suggests a more extroverted feel; he’s looking for more attention, or trying to be more unique than past artists. Whatever the meaning of this self-portrait, this piece definitely stands out!



B) “Self Portrait 1658” By: Rembrandt. This style of painting was widely recognized in the time period that it was created. Very romantic rich color tones, lush fabrics, and serious undertoned moods made these works the incredible style that they are. Portraits like these simply blow me away! So life-like and accurate!? I have no idea how people like Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci created such masterpieces of their time!



C) “Self Portrait” (1980) By: Albert Hirschfeld. This is a great self-portrait… he’s taking ink straight out of his head and putting it on paper- how clever! ☺ This picture perfectly represents Hirschfield’s artistic style as a caricaturist, while also showing his admirers and audience where his ideas seem to come from. I think the reason why this picture is so appealing to me, is because of its simplicity, yet it looks just like Mr. Hirschfeld. Pen and ink were the only two mediums used in creating this portrait, so it could also be the black and white coloration that grabs my attention as well. Usually self-portraits scream out with color (which isn’t a bad thing either).

blog pt3

This is Tiger by Franz Marc. I think this picture could easily be translated into illustrator. The clean lines and shapes make it already look like it could be an illustrator image. I believe that this is a woodblock print, but I could not find out. The black and white of the tigers makes them really pop and gives a lot of life to a fairly dull scene. There is very little negative space in this picture which keeps your gaze moving around the picture. The picture and process of the art don't relate, but prints like this are usually one color and the color of the paper, much like tigers with their solid black stripes and orange bodies. 

blog pt2

This is a self portrait by Claude Monet. This is an example of the impressionist movement. The artists of the time were moving away from the old style of dark realistic paintings and moving towards the impressionist style. The style involved bright colors and well lit scenes with visible brush strokes. It was harshly rejected by art authorities of the time, however this only served to fuel the ambition of the early impressionist painters.

Blog pt1

2

1.

This is a self portrait by Egon Schiele. The picture shows him in a femenine sort of pose with femenine features. Much of his other art dealt with sexuality. I think that this may have just been his style though. It shows him in a confident pose, looking down at the viewer. He looks happy and lively, although in most of his other paintings he looks isolated and upset. This could be a picture of him at a good time in his life, or just simply showing his large ego.

David Hockney's painting I think could be translated into Illustrator. The lines in this piece are what first caught my eye, which is why I could see a work like this used for the computer. The colors are also very vivid; I think color always brings a new dimension to art. I am hoping I can achieve an effect like this in my Illustrator assignment.

part 2

Picasso is at the heart of Cubism. The figures in this piece are represented by the basic shapes and colors that make them up. I think by making some of the faces "ugly" Picasso made the piece much more interesting. So-called flaws or differences in people are what create interest in a work of art. I think the way the women are posed in this painting- very simply- makes it easier to see the more basic shapes which are so important to the cubism movement.

part 1

Frieda Kahlo is representing self in this piece mainly through the objects and actions around her. She is creating a border between the United States and Mexico, which depicts a very important aspect in her life. She is also showing what she associates with each country; The United States is very industrial and Mexico much less. I think her identity is shown in this piece through her way of showing the world as she sees it.

Kayla Kaser's Still Life in Illustrator

For this project I mainly played with the Pen tool to create curvy lines/paths and filled spaces. I also tried out the Rectangle tool to make circles and other odd shapes. Messing with line thinkness and color degrees was fun here too. (I still like Photoshop more though.) :)

Self-Portrait Process

ARTIST'S USE OF SELF-PORTRAIT:



Self-Portrait 17
Gottfried Helnwein
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

This first image is a painting done by Gottfried Helnwein, a pretty famous contemporary artist working mainly in the realm of hyperrealism. I would've chosen one of his realistic self-portraits, but quite honestly you can't tell it's a painting so it's a poor choice for anything related to Illustrator. Anyways, Helnwein's work often explores dark and disturbing aspects of humanity, as well as the absurdity of famous cartoons and how that relates to what we experience (he often incorporates Disney characters into his paintings.) If this weren't titled as a self-portrait, there'd be no way to tell who (or what) he was painting. The two darker areas in the image hint towards eyes and there's a vague head-shaped structure to support that idea. Perhaps he's trying to comment on how humans try to self-identify with anything that's vaguely relatable and that the concept of "self" and individuality is something vague and perhaps absent. Or else I could be completely wrong. Moving on...

PICTORIAL ART MOVEMENT:

Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football Player (Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension)
Kazimir Malevich
Oil on Canvas

So the movement I looked at and am going to be incorporating into my self-portrait is "Suprematism." It came out of Russia in the early 20th century and was mainly the work of Kazimir Malevich. It laid down the foundations for following abstractions and my favorite art movement, minimalism. The picture is 'supposed' to represent a football player, though how and why is left entirely up to the viewer. In fact, I read that he would often hang his pictures in different orientations, so while it may look like the green circle is supposed to be the bottom of the picture here, if you were to see it in a gallery it could be hung with that at the top and still be 'right.'

GRAPHIC MEDIUM:

Here's a self-portrait by the grafitti artist Neckface. Grafitti is pretty cool but sometimes it gets a bit tried and true, which is why I enjoy Neckface's work so much. He usually uses solid black contours with maybe a color or two to pop something out of its environment. His style is, I guess, "creepy" and very un-grafitti-like, which is great. I think he recently designed a shoe for Nike, too. Anyways, because his style is so illustrative, it would be easy to do something similar in Illustrator, possibly even emulating the spraypaint feel by using a brush. My favorite thing about grafitti is the fact that, it, like graphic design, is something that's somewhat ever-present (well, maybe not here in St. Cloud, but...) I also enjoy how it takes something that wasn't meant to be "painterly" or "artsy" and uses it in a fashion that is, similar to how modernist architects used industrial materials to make homes, etc.

Process

Chuck Close
Self-Portrait, 2004-2005
Oil on canvas
102 x 86

a) Chuck Close is representing himself by using a grit pattern in which each square is filled with ring-shaped colors. This gives an organic sense to the image. The whole image seems like a blurry figure on a photograph that has been zoomed in. In creating this artwork, Close puts the grid on his photograph and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Only seen from a distance, the relative accuracy of the image emerges. His representation of identity is processed mechanically and somewhat inhumanly. His face is emotionless. However, partly because of his unique color layout for each cell, the finished work has yet a sense of human quality, which makes this self-portrait interesting.




Leonardo da Vinci
Self-portrait
Red chalk, c 1512 to 1515

b) Leonardo da Vinci was the oldest of the three great artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael) in the High Renaissance in Italy. He was also seen as quintessential Renaissance man. The drawings of this period show distinctive traits such as the balance, proportion, harmony, regularity that define classicism, greater fluidity of figures, and use of modeling and perspective devices. The self-portrait in red chalk by Leonard da Vinci exemplifies the High Renaissance in terms of realism and humanity, which artists were most concerned with at the time of the era. Now we have contemporary styles like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art whose main theme is not realism.




c) This example of a ‘Graphic’ art medium is a woodcut by Katsushika Hokusai. This image is the most well known piece from the woodblock print series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He also produced another landscape series called One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and published fifteen-volume collection Hokusai Manga in 1814, which contained about 4,000 sketches. I believe this sketch is one of the important elements of art making; therefore, it can be one of the things that this medium relates to illustrator though many people may not need any sketches before they use illustrator. Ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world” often has a quality of linearity as this image does. Colors are applied later after curved or outlined with black, thick line. This medium could be translated with illustrator for those reasons. The most striking to me about this medium, looking at this work by Hokusai, is the vigorously depicted waves and the splashes, which seem to move lively in the pictorial space. The dramatic movement of the highest wave that is about to strike the boats conveys a sense of excitement and terror. In contrast, the Mount Fuji remotely sits in the slightly off centered pictorial space produces an air of tranquility, which is also

Self Portrait process

Blog A)
The artist I chose was Frieda Kahlo. I included 2 of Kahlo's self portraits. She painted with bright, vibrant colors in a style influenced by indiginous mexican culture, as well as realism and symbolism. Frieda symbolically expresses her own pain in many of her works, which is one of the reasons I am drawn to her. She doesn't sugar-coat herself, or try and make herself look better on the canvas. Her inner feelings towards herself are expressed as her pain. When she was 6 years old, Frieda contracted Polio, which left her right leg looking thinner. A few years later she was in an accident which broke her spinal column, collar bone, ribs, and pelvis, also fracturing her right leg, dislocated her right foot, and shoulder. Her uterus was also impaled by a handrail, damaging reproductive ability. After the accident she learned how to walk again and recovered from her injuries, but she had relapses of extreme pain and had to undergo about 35 operations in her life because of the accident. Physical pain was a big part of Kahlo's life, and her paintings show a lot of what she was going through and how she identified herself..




Blog B)
I chose The green stripe(portrait of madam Matisse) by Henri Matisse.
Matisse was a Fauvist painter. When he painted his wife in this picture he was not trying to show his love for her, it was not about the expression on her face...but the expression of color. His style was painting expression, not passion. Now obviously Madam Matisse did not have a green stripe running down the center of her face. This is where Matisse gets into the expression of colors and how the light hit her face, there was a greenish tint...so he painted it. Matisse represents with the expression of color, rather than emotions.





Blog C)
I chose a Graffiti artist who goes by the name Mr Steven. I showed him working on a self portrait, and also a break dancer piece. The latter looks like one that could be quite easy to work with in illustrater. This medium is greffiti and the break dancer depicted relates well with the genre and group affiliated with graffiti artists, along with hip hop artists and deejays.
I am a huge fan of graffiti art. I never really acknowledged it until I dated a Graffiti artist from AKB. He really opened my eyes to what Graffiti was all about and how artistic it can be. The picture shown is one that uses a 2d design on the background then turning the focal point into a 3d object.

Portrait Blog

A) Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Self-portrait as an artist, 1888
Oil on canvas, 66 x 50 cm
Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Van Gogh is obviously representing himself as an artist in this self-portrait it was a good idea because he actually was an artist. Van Gogh wanted to do portraits, but couldn’t afford models so self-portraits were an inexpensive alternative. Last semester, my drawing teacher said that self-portraits were the hardest to create because you are always the most critical on them. Van Gogh barely idolized this self-portrait, making himself look tired and putting his face in shadow.


B) Picasso, Pablo. Self-portrait (1907) National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic.

This self-portrait of Picasso was drawn roughly in the cubist style. The objective of cubist portraiture is the show all angles of the body at once, which brought about flat, unnatural twisting of the body and face. This particular self portrait is actually more realistic then a true cubist painting, but it stills follows the style with by using color rather then shading to create a sense of depth, although a rather shallow depth.


C) Andy Warhol Early Self-Portrait, 1964
Acrylic, silver paint and silkscreen ink on canvas 50.8 x 41 cm
Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart
© 2004 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York

Warhol started off his art career as a commercial graphics artist. Creating this self-portrait using silkscreen, I think relates back to his commercial career. What is most striking to me is the minimalist look of Warhol’s Early Self Portrait. He only used four different colors and very few lines to create this piece. I also like how the line defines the inner shape of the objects, like the nose and hair, instead of the outline that you usually see.

Vases

I mainly just used the pen tool... which took me a while to get used to! I also filled some spots in with the paint bucket and used the paintbrush. I have never used Illustrator before so this was really hard for me! :( I need some more work with this program.

Vases

Self Portrait Blog.

Blog A: For part A of the blog assignment I chose this self portrait by Andy Warhol. Warhol Represents himself in a serious yet playful manner that represents many of his pieces. This piece looks as if it could be created nicely in illustrator. It's a pretty simple looking self portrait, only using a few colors. I really enjoyed looking at his work and self portraits.

Blog B: For part B of the blog assignment I chose Cubism as my historical movement. I chose Cubism because Picasso is one of my favorite artists and I love how he represents people and portraits in a manner that isn't the norm, but yet you can still make out the picture. I think it's very interesting art to loook at. it gives you a different view or perspective of the meaning of portrait.

Blog C: The medium i chose for part C of the blog was Graffiti. I looked at many different photos and artists that have to do with Graffiti and it was really interesting to me. Most of the pictures I researched on the internet looked as if they were created or could be created in Illustrator. I think Graffiti images could be made pretty easy, because it is very colorful and very basic most of the time. Many of the tools in Illustrator would work good.

Blog for Ilustrator!

This piece is from Alex Katz, it is oil on canvas (1964). To answer the first question, Alex is depicting self in a very simple way. Most of her portraits are done this way. Simple, using minimal colors. The artwork looks very clean this way. I think this is what Alex is trying to come by on representing the "self". Clean and simple. The identity is kind of hard to describe, simplicity? This woman could be going out on a date, to a special event..we don't really know because its just of her.

A movement that always seems to be around for a while anyways, is PopArt. Beginning in the 60's pop art can now be created in digital media. One of the most famous artworks is Warhols, with Marilyn Monroe. This style is depicted in the picture below with the wedding pictures.

The picture that I will talk about for being good for illustrator is the one I showed in the first paragraph by Alex Katz. It is oil on canvas, and just the shapes and colors would make it very simple to bring out in illustrator and make it work well. I think trying to make it all blend will be a little bit tough, but could make it work.

Self Portrait Blog - C

Paul Gauguin did this self portrait in 1889. This one felt more 'graphic' to me as were many of Gauguin's works. The lines were bold and distinct. This was an oil painting but has a blocky feeling that I think would translate well to Illustrator. The colors are simple and there is not a lot of shading between the images.

I just used the pen tool and traced the shape of the figures. Then I filtered colors to them.

I wanted to learn more about illustrator.

Self Portrait Blog - B

Rembrandt van Rijn painted this self portrait in 1661. This one was done later in his life (age 55) after some personal setbacks. Here he presents himself as a more humbled, less assertive person, especially when compared with his self portraits over 20 years earlier. He shows his sagging cheeks & shoulders and wrinkles in his forehead. He is actually painting himself as St. Paul with his traditional sword slightly visible. Rembrandt was one of the Baroque period's greatest painters. He, like Caravaggio, often used dramatic lighting in his portraits. The diagonal felling to this painting is another characteristic of Baroque period paintings.

Illustrator chair

Mine is kind of boring. This is my first time using Illustrator.

I mostly used the pen tool to trace and replace the images.

 I used several layers to make the leaves of the trees. 

Self Portrait Blog - A

Self Portrait with Daughter Julie (1786)
Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun was one of the most prolific painters of her time. She was one of the favorite painters of the French Queen, Marie Antoniette. Her talent as well as her association with Royalty helped with her acceptance into the Royal Academy, extremely rare for a female artist.

Often female artists did not want themselves to appear 'unprofessional' as painters by showing a more femine side of themselves. Tehy felt they would not be taken seriously as an artist. By the time Vigee-Lebrun painted this portrait, she was well established as an artist. She wanted to be seen as a good mother also and close to her daughter, Julie. She also could make her self image flattering by using a more youthful appearance.

Love it. I think it is very simple yet creative. I like how Andy Warhol created this image. I know these are not self-portraits but I like the way these images were done. The simplicity of these images and how he used three or four colors to complete the portrait. I like the Hepburn image because of how only two colors were used and you can still see the shape of her face and the design of her outfit and the style of her hair. I think it is very creative.
Serigraphy

I like this type of media. I think the serigraphy is similar to the portraits above. They also use
two colors for the people and it is very detailed. I think by using the pen tool I would be able to recreate images just like these. I like the simplicity of this.


Cubism interests me because of the way the images depict cubes and still depicts an image.
Post Impressionism interests me as well because of how free the brush strokes seem to be. It is no longer realism. You get to use your imagination and see the impasto surface