The assignment was to draw two public icons: one you love, and one you hate. We were to communicate our love and our hate in our choice of mark-marking, colors, pose, etc. I chose Gandhi for the public icon I love; I won’t be showing the “other” public icon. I will say that she appears regularly on Fox News, and has expressed the sentiment that women should be armed but not allowed to vote, since they have “no capacity to understand how money is earned.” That’s enough of a hint, I think.
I had more trouble figuring out what to do about Gandhi, because I cared about whether I would like the outcome. I did an acrylic ink wash to start. Then I poured some acrylic matte medium into a squeeze bottle and drew the lines. I had planned to use composite (a.k.a fake) gold leaf on the matte medium lines, but it turned out that only 23K gold leaf would actually stick to the lines. Aargh! I gilded the outline of his head and did some other lines. The rest of the lines I overpainted in Schmincke pearl gold gouache. I am nothing if not persistent. If you click on the thumbnail for a closer look, you can see the two colors of gold. I think it’s more obvious in the photo than in real life. The reason I gilded the outline was so that I could wash the outer world in a muddy outer-world color (which I also used on the other icon in a similar way for a different reason) without disturbing the outline.
Beth, lovely work. I like that you left that other icon unnamed, she really doesn’t deserve any kind of mention. Hope you had fun with her, tho! I bet it was cathartic!
I was actually a little disappointed with the result on the other icon. When laid down a transfer base, the image looked wonderfully like a bizarro Mona Lisa. But I couldn’t leave it at that — I was required to do more by the assignment — and somehow I lost that look. I did transfer bunches of quotes in the background and then washed gray over them, and I like that. But otherwise, that part of the project was sort of a bust. She did look suitably wacky though, with mismatched eyes, an oversized-looking (but, oddly, not actually oversized) nose, and devil’s horns 🙂
he he he…the other icon, indeed! Wouldn’t it be fun to let our political genies out of the bottle once in a while?!
I like what you’re doing in school. I too am busy with school; since mine is clinical counseling, there is no blog-related work to show. 🙁
Do you know Joe Sanders?
Margaret
I don’t have that much blog-related stuff to show, either.
I met with Joe Sanders last year — he’s the Department Head of the School of Visual Art within the College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance. How do you know him?