Project 1 - Layers of Me

I want to begin the year with something familiar to all my students.What's more familiar that their own face? Also the fact that I know that whether the students came from Art I, Art II, or Basic Design they all will have some background knowledge of bas relief, the artist Chuck Close or the grid method of enlarging. While I know that most of my students have been exposed to these aspects of art, their actual knowledge of them is debatable. But, it does give me a familiar ground to start on.

Starting from the back end. What will they create? They will demonstrate their knowledge of bas relief, the methods of artists like Chuck Close, and their understanding of how to use digital imaging through the creation of a relief self portrait. First we'll construct the art work and then we will investigate means of creating the surface design. Before we do this their will be other inquiry into the art history, symbolism, surface design techniques, and other knowledge building exercises.

Bas relief portrait based on a photograph. This is the relief in progress. A few more layers of card board then it's ready for surface design.

To create my example I used a photo of my daughter and transformed it into a bas relief sculpture.

Step 1: Take a picture - Step 2 - desaturate the image.

Step 3. Grid the image.

Step 4: Use the grid to draw the imagesbigger on another paper.

The other pictures of the process that will be on my web site. Blogger just takes too long to upload the images that they will have to wait end get up on my site.