Concentration #12: "Infatuated"

Here is my last concentration--I can't believe it's done, woohoo! Anyways, I wanted to inject a little more humor into my concentration (the only other one with some kind of humor is #5, Terrified) by portraying the "lovesick" emotion (good job capturing that, Dustin). This time I wanted to make the whole composition just the portrait, yet incorporate design into the portrait in the form of abstracting the values into concrete shapes. To bring across the emotion, I used a red/pink color scheme, citrasolved images of roses in the face, citrasolved images of Valentine hearts in the background, and hand-wrote (with the help of others) fake, passioned love letters which went in the face and the background. I feel like this concentration is successful because there is a good level of layering/complexity, high contrast, and obvious execution of the emotion. Although it may be a step back conceptually from my story-like previous pieces, I feel like overall it's one of my better ones. Merry Christmas!

Concentration #11: "Jealous"

Ok, so first of all, I know this picture has some glare on it; I'll replace it with a better picture when the oil paint dries. This is my attempt at another solely oil paint piece-I didn't want "Peaceful" to be the only oil painting. I feel like this piece is one of the better ones thematically, but one of the weaker ones technically. My idea to convey the emotion of jealousy was to stretch reality by transforming the portrait into a gargoyle, looking on from the top of a church where a faceless couple are getting married. The fact that the person is a statue emphasizes the harshness and all-consuming nature of jealousy. The design in this is the repetition of the garden hedges onto the side of the building and into the background: almost as if the emotion of jealousy is closing in on everything, a festering emotion. I had a lot of trouble with this one--I did a lot of problem-solving and had to re-acquaint myself with the basics of oil painting...I feel like, technically, I still have a ways to go. I am happy with the values in the statue, yet I could not get the style to become lose, abstract, and focused on shape (like Emily Branch's stuff). After the critique (and Mrs. Danahy's help), I re-drew and re-sized the gargoyle, defined shapes, and lightened up the background to make the values make more sense. Overall, I am not satisfied with this, and plan to try and revisit it somehow.