On the 5th, I spent most of my time experimenting with ideas for one of my backgrounds. Trying to find a way to take elements from my left and right pieces proved to be a lot more difficult than I had initially expected. Using pill shapes and the swirling patterns of DNA seemed like an impossible task, but through a bit if trial and error, I was able to create a simple pattern. I decided to utilize the DNA shape, but instead of using dots, I decided to switch them into green paxil pills. To carry over from the pastor piece, I decide to incorporate the prozac pill motif into the centers of the paxil strands, creating an image reminiscent of African inspired cloth. With the time that I put in, I felt relieved that I was able to finally come up with something. Despite that, when I put the image against the others. I felt like something was off about them all together.

This brings me to today’s group critique. Luckily with the help of my group I was able to figure out what was off about my work. It simply felt really busy. The colors were  all at the same intensity, causing them all to blur into each other and be pretty distracting. Since I had my layers up, I was able to work through some of the suggestions I was given  such as adjusting the opacity of my background layers. Just with that small adjustment, I felt like my eyes were able to relax a bit more. I feel like that was definitely a great suggestion for my work. I believe another useful suggestion was adding a sort of halo to my center image. I noticed over time that it was a lot harder to differentiate between the background and the character’s hair. I think the  halo suggestion may really help bring out the line work for the hair much more than it is now. Hopefully with the long weekend ahead I can put a little more work time in with these new suggestions.

Since we had small meetings planned with our instructors, I was hoping I could get some advise on how to go about refining my images and their backgrounds. I was initially worried about how a somewhat mixed media work like mine would be received, especially in its later stages, but it turns out I didn’t have to worry TOO much.  I was generally surprised that the reception was so positive, and that it seemed like my work had been paying off. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve been proud of something I made in ages. I think I’ll have to make adjustments to the preacher piece, possibly adding a photographic element into the pills in some way. I had been experimenting with stained glass designs, but it’s all a matter of finding one that’s effective and can work as an overlay on the pill shapes. That and I have to refine the pill bottle more.It was a bit difficult for me to attempt to render on properly, nut with a little bit more of a push , I could push it forward to be more accurate. Maybe adding an identifiable label to make it looks more like a prescription. For the image of the girl with the images in her hair, I was really unsure how to unify its background with the other two, so I was recommended to experiment with some of the visual elements from the other pieces to incorporate into the first one. It’ll be tricky to merge christian themes/pills with DNA, but with a little time, I think I may be able to come up with something.

I can honestly say that I was able to get quite a bit done during this class. While my image of the girl with the images in her hair still has a plain black background and the preacher image still has only pills against a black background added.

I made significant progress on the image featuring the DNA strands. Not only was I able to finally age woman up, I was able to incorporate some images into the DNA strands. Aging my character up was a new experience for me since I do not typically draw older people, so for a first attempt, I think it turned out quite well. For the strands, I wanted to keep my idea of the positive markers on the green side and the negative markers on the red side, but I also wanted to incorporate that although time has passed not much has changed. For example, I used and image from the March on Selma in 1965 and how the issues brought to attention there are being  mirrored through the Black Lives Matter marches of the last four years. In addition to that, I wanted to mirror how slavery in the early days of our country are being mirrored by the abuse of a loophole in the 13th amendment. I feel like including these details really added to the idea of featuring an older character, as she has either lived through these events or  carried the weight of them within her like strands of DNA.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to refine the details of the other images within the week.