Still Life
This is a still life I did last year in AP 2D Design. Mrs. Chambliss arranged different objects on a table and the assignment was to choose a portion of the display to focus on and create a still life from it. This assignment challenged me to use colors and shadows to make my art appear more three dimensional.
Emma
After the still life, I started exploring what I wanted my junior year concentration to be. I’ve always had a love for environmentalism, the outdoors, and psychology, so I chose to focus on how nature influences human wellbeing. Many psychological studies show that being in natural surroundings correlate to happiness and a better quality of life, so I focused on how I’d convey that through art. This was the first attempt at exploring this theme.
Ella
In this piece, I wanted to illustrate how humans are uniquely connected to their natural surroundings in a more literal way. I drew the portrait in pencil and all of the plants and succulents are magazine clippings and cutouts from different digital photos I had of plants and the outdoors.
Annabel
This piece I created using monochromatic colored pencils and I also glued on these decorative flowers - another attempt at showing the interconnectedness between humans and our environment.
Inside Out
This was the last piece I did for my junior year concentration. I used gold and silver colored pencils to make the self portrait and glued on scraps of textured wrapping paper in three different areas. I also added some brown threading to outline the paper and leaves. This was the first time I tried blending metallic colored pencils, which was definitely more tedious and difficult than I would’ve thought, but this piece also introduced me to using a needle and thread on paper which was a technique I ended up really loving and using later on in my work.
Dissociative Identity
For my senior year portfolio, I took this theme in a different direction. I knew I wanted to draw from mental health and brain scans, probably inspired by the 13 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy I binge-watched over quarantine. One of the things I learned from the show was that certain mental illnesses can actually be picked up by MRI and PET scans, so I included brain scans in each of my pieces.
This first piece is inspired by Dissociative Identity Disorder. When I first explored this illness, I wanted to find a way to convey it metaphorically I found that people with the illness experience a feeling that they are always missing a piece of the puzzle that makes up their identity, which causes them to adopt more than one personality.
OCD
This piece was based off of OCD, or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. What stood out to me about this disorder was a chronic desire for perfection. In this mixed media piece, I used blue colored pencil, printed MRI scans, and different colors of thread.
Pulling at Heartstrings
This is based off of Hypersensitivity and the tendency to overanalyze criticisms that we receive. To convey this illness through metaphor, I choose to illustrate the saying "pulling at heartstrings." I drew the heart in different shades of red and used blue and red thread to make it appear more three dimensional.
Split Personality
This piece is based on Split Personality Disorder. I conveyed this illness in a very literal way by splitting my face down the middle. In the background, I glued on brain scans from a patient with the disorder, and used gesso, which is a thick white paint mixture that gives the piece more texture.
Multiple Personality
This is my most recent piece, inspired by Multiple Personality Disorder. I was interested in the concept of showing different sides of yourself to the world, which I illustrated by drawing my face from different angles. In this piece I used graphite pencil and collage.
