senior: hero

for this project we were asked to do a portrait of our "hero". what an awful word. but i thought about someone who influenced me and who i look up to and had to jump on the cliche bandwagon and settle for my momma. what can i say!? she's the best ;) her work was my entire understanding of art growing up, and it's admittedly been a challenge to bypass my admiration for her self-taught style in developing my own. but finally i think that's happening, and i am so grateful for what i've learned from her. you can check out her work at janroy.com!

ANYWAY growing up she was a silk screen artist and that's really where it all started for me, so i did my own play on the traditional printing method by using watercolor and gouache to print with, meaning they all come out totally different! the face is a digitally printed pencil drawing i did based off the photo my dad keeps on his dresser. then with the screen i used two different methods. one i learned from my friend calvin using watercolor. you paint onto the screen and let it dry. then you run clear base over it, to "re-awaken" the pigment. i've seen his prints using this method and they're gorgeous, but honestly, it didn't work out for me. my colors came out too unsaturated. instead i resorted to using gouache, something i did in london when the print studio had closed for the season and i still had prints to do! it's pretty simple: just paint over the area and quickly squeegee. the results vary a lot. some come out really raw in texture, and some are more painterly. it's all to do, i'm sure, with how much paint is used, where it may have dried before being printed, and how much water is used. i only printed five and i posted all of them so you can see the differences. i've put them in order of success (the top being my favorite)