Half of Me- Unconventional Self Portrait

I worked with my classmate Gabby, and we couldn't decide who to do a portrait of, so we thought, why not do both of us? We ended up cropping half of both our faces together and making it one. We went to the store and found strings of beads that we thought would be perfect for our project, and decided to use them to outline the features in our faces. We used photoshop to manipulate the picture a bit, then traced the picture onto a piece of cardboard, and painted over the lines to make the features stand out. We were kinda nervous that cropping our faces together wouldn't work out and would ruin the piece, but our skin colors contrasted very well and made the portrait look really cool. Another problem we ran into was trying to make the hair look okay, and since we have completely different hair types we didn't know if it would make the picture look weird. Once we glued the beads on, it actually made it look really cool and created a nice contrast. By making the decision to put our faces together and add beads, we made the piece look really cool and different from traditional portraits. Together we have vibrant, fun personalities, so we were able to show that by incorporating the different colored beads. 

 

Macaroni Mayhem - Sticky Situation

I had only thought about a few things when I started brainstorming, but never really decided on any of those. I went to my friends house that night for dinner and had Mac N Cheese, and came up with the idea of painting that. Were you able to think outside the box when you were thinking about ideas? I was able to think outside the box because other people were doing simple things like gum or candy, but when I decided on Mac N Cheese, I came up with so many different ideas for the design and how to make it look sticky. I made a neat pattern by using raw macaroni noodles and gluing them to the canvas so they made the shape of one big noodle. The piece still seemed a little plain, so I scattered more raw noodles around the canvas, as well as painting some in the background. It really brought the picture to life, and I was able to make it look extra cheesy and sticky by using hot glue and painting over it so it looked like strings of melted cheese. I had a lot of fun using the macaroni, and this piece definitely helped me improve on mixing acrylics so I could make different shades of yellow for the cheese. It took me a few tries to find the right yellows but once I figured it out, it really helped improve the piece. The mini lessons we did helped me a lot with the shading on the macaroni I had to actually paint. It's still hard for me to get it just right but I feel like I did better with shading on this project compared to previous ones.