"An Inspiring Condemnation of White Supremacy by Our New Fuhrer" is complete (I like really long, not-so-subtle titles)! For the first project of the year, I'm pretty happy with it. Some of the finer details of the stencil didn't turn out as well as they could've and the edges are a bit blotched because of the spray paint getting beneath the stencil, but I did what I could. I tried using a foam roller but it was even worse, causing it to look really bad, losing all the details I put into the stencils. I ended up choosing a lot of political, local newspapers to spray on top of because it was relevant to the subject matter and I feel like newspapers, while they aren't as widely used, still retain an innate.. "impact" to them.
The goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, are pretty straight-forward.
- Create a comic strip I'm satisfied with
- Create a detailed stencil larger than 5 feet of a detailed subject
- A series of pixel art animations
These are all in some ways or another, continuations of work I've found to be challenging and fun. And, at the end of these goals, I have one thing I want to accomplish by the end of this year:
- Find some sort of workflow I am happy with as an artist, and one I can continue to work in long-term.
I don't think my skills nor choice of media will completely be worked out by time I graduate from MLWGS, those are life-long developments which will fluctuate and change, but I want to have a process I deeply enjoy and do on my own time. Part of the reason I don't wish to continue art into college, or at least not major in it, is because I want to create art for myself. If I'm unable to create art without having school, money, or some other interest behind it aside from the art itself, it doesn't really feel like art anymore.
I think this project tackled those goals well. It's setting up my technical abilities for the larger 5-foot stencil well (I'm probably gonna do a multilayered one too), and working on it gave me a better understanding of how I work on art at home. It's much more spontaneous and infrequent than in class, but I tend to get more work done. Managing that more, and utilizing more of the studio time is gonna be important in future projects. I ended up using a chunk of the studio time I was given on other classes, which has made my home project fall behind as I use that time for the studio project. I need to separate the two better, and put in more work on the home one while keeping the studio one to studio time only.