Illustration
Title: The Dancer and The Performer Size: 25.5 cm x 38 cm Medium: Mixed Medium- Acrylic and Gauche Completed: November 2023 Exhibition Text This piece is about my personal experience with dance and the difference between dancing with emotion versus dancing in the ballet industry. These pieces together are portraying positive and negative ideas with gauche and acrylic. This piece is also representative of my personal mindset on what dance is and how I eventually formed a healthy relationship with it.
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Artistic Influence
Artist in Focus: Edgar Degas
I used this piece because I love the contrast between intricate, detailed ballerina in the foreground compared to the loose brushstrokes for the background. This adds emphasis on the detail that is put into the art of ballet which is the story I am trying to tell with this piece. I am manipulating this piece with myself as the dancer since I am telling my experience of growing up as a ballet dancer. I am recreating myself in the same pose as the dancer in "L'Etoile" but I wanted to change the background to be just a flat color. Degas utilizes the impressionist style with un-blended brushstrokes and layers of color. This style makes the ballerina seem whimsical and soft. |
Artist in Focus: William Blake
This work stood out to me since it is very whimsical around the idea of dancing. Since I am trying to show this in my work, I wanted to replicate it but I felt that it did not fit with my positive illustration. I decided to use this for my negative piece around art by changing the hues of the dancers to seem more ominous. This painting is a depiction of Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream made in 1786. This is important information since I am trying to capture the negative aspect of ballet, an old institution that still holds onto values from around this time. I also clung to this work since there are thin outlines around the subjects and drowned out pale skin tones. |
Artist in Focus: Jean de Paleologue
I was particularly drawn to this art work by Paleologue because of the use of colors incorporated around the subject in the center. I looked at this piece and interpreted it as the emotion that is being released around the dancer being represented with the colors. This was the perfect piece for me since that was what I was trying to portray with the positive feeling of dance. I also loved the artists contrast between the colors and the black background. This, to me, captured the feeling of being in your own world when truly loving dancing. The main thing I am changing about this piece is that the girl in the middle is going to be a self portrait of me dancing. Another thing I am changing is the lettering on the bottom of the poster. This does not fit into the composition of my art work and it does not make sense with the meaning of the piece. |
Planning
The first part of my planning was to alter photos to better support my artistic idea. The first thing I changed was "Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing" by William Blake. Since I wanted to make the piece fit into a negative theme, I changed the color of the overall image to red since that is often associated with anger and evil. I did this by adding the image to Photopea, which is an editing app. I clicked the image tab which drops down different editing options. From there, I selected adjustments and then a photo filter. I changed the whole image to red and then put the density at 100%. Then I messed around with the brightness and contrast. I increased the contrast and darkened the shadows since the original image had light and soft hues.
Reference Photos
I tried many different poses to mimic "L'Etoile (The Star)" by Degas. I analysed her body posture and the angle of her composition. I did a round of poses and none of them looked right so I changed the angle of my phone. The painting is showing the dancer from a much higher angle. I put my phone on the top part of my window sill to capture the right angle. Once I altered my poses and angles many times, I found a photo with the resemblance of the original.
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These were the references I used for the board creating "La Loie Fuller". I did not try and recreate the pose of the original dancer since I wanted the poses to be more natural. It was important that the poses made me look like I was dancing while also being happy since I am trying to tell the story of my love for dance. The way I took these was by taking a video on my iPhone that was leveled at about my waist and around 5 feet away. I then started dancing making sure to do diverse positions and then I went through the video and captured the exact moments I thought fit my idea. I decided on these two but I loved the picture on the left because of how happy I looked but I had a problem with the position of my legs. So I sketched out the top half of the picture on the left and then used the picture on the right to sketch out the legs.
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These are the figure sketches I did in my sketchbook before starting on the actual planning sketches. I wanted to see how much space I would need to use in order to make the paper look full. This was hard since I kept thinking that the proportions were off because of the angle of the images. These sketches did help me a lot to think about how to make the larger drawers on my poster board to the same scale.
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The next thing I did before starting the project was making a complete drawing of the two illustrations. I did this on large paper and then took my poster board and traced it twice on two pieces of paper so that my drawings were accurate in size. I started with making stick figures that matched the poses I was using then slowly expanding on the thickness and detail of the bodies.
Process
The next step was transferring the sketches on to the graphed poster boards. I not only drew the forms but also any highlights/shadows and color changes I circled so it was easier for me to spot what I was doing later on. I did like how these sketches turned out so I quickly moved on to the next step and did not adjust any parts of the figures.
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This is where I actually started painting. I used acrylic paint and started with all of the warm tones first. I mixed yellow, red, and white, and kept adjusting the ratios of each color until I found the exact shade I was looking for. At first I put the yellow as too pale but I went over it once I realized it needed to be darker. I also had to do multiple coats of the yellow areas since the grid was peaking through the color. Then once I got all of the orange/yellow colors done, I moved onto red. This was simpler to make since the red is pretty similar to the color out of the tube, so there needed to be little adjustments and mixing. The only red colors I changed were the ones closest to the top, they needed to be darker than the true color so I mixed burnt umber brown into them to dull them. Then I moved to pinks since I already had red paint out. At first I mixed just red and white together but I realized that it was too soft of a pink color so I added yellow which gave it more vibrancy. Then I worked on purple areas even though it's not a warm tone. I mixed red and blue for the lighter areas and for the darker purple on the bottom, I used blue, red, and brown. I had to use thin brushes for the purple since their shapes have sharp corners that I did not want to cover.
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Then I started expanding my color range by working on painting the cooler tones. It took me a while to mess around with the blues since there are so many different shades. The trick that helped the most was mixing small amounts of green into the blue shades. This made shades that I felt were accurate to the reference image. For the darker parts of blue, I just used the color straight out of the tube since the shade is already really dark. Because of this, I had to add a lot of white to the color but that altered how soft the color ended up being. The lighter blue on the top of the illustration has a lot of white mixed in where the blue closest to the bottom of the illustration to the right is the straight color. I was scared for using a blue that dark since it looked similar to black and I did not want the color to blend in with the black background I was going to use. A lot of the blue spots were in crevices so I had to use a small angled brush to help me achieve clean lines. There were many times that the line did not look clean so I ended up extending the section.
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I took a break from the acrylic part of the painting and switched to working with gauche. I did not want to use acrylic for the whole piece since there are lighter parts of the piece that have a more faded look than acrylic paints. This whole section is cool tones but I started with a light layer with a lot of water. Then as that dried I slowly put the color more concentrated to make it darker. I did not want to make the color too dark and then not be able to fix it so I worked my way up. The purple in this area was really patchy and I could see the brushstrokes so I took a little bit of water and put that on a flat brush and lightly went over the area but in the opposite direction of the brushstrokes. This helped a little but there were still some strokes at the end. For the white area within the purple, I already had purple paint down but I just added a lot of water and cleared the paint out of that area.
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I added the black background and part of my leg. I was going to save the background for last but I wanted to see what the colors looked like against black instead of white. I did not outline the areas close to my legs and arms because I knew I still wanted to change the outline a little bit. I had a hard time making the black smooth because I was applying a thin layer so that there was no texture but it dried unevenly. I waited for it to fully dry and then start another layer of black. I then started with my legs. In "L'Etoile", her legs are blue because of the lighting so I wanted to make mine blue as well. I used gauche for this part because I found it easy to blend and add dimension. Since I was layering colors, I had to wait for it to dry each time so it would not bleed in places I did not want it to be.
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In this step, I started working on my figure. I was waiting to work on this till the end since I did not know if I wanted to do it in acrylic paint or gauche. I decided on gauche since the colors have a faded look. I was expecting this part to be harder but it was surprisingly easy. I used a thin- watered down layer of peach for my arms and face and then used less water for shadows. For the darkest shadows, I used blue instead of brown/black because it connects my torso to the rest of the image since my bottom half is blue.
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I ended up adding the rest of the black around my feet, arm, and the space around my elbow. I used the black to clean up the edges of the colors that were kind of messy. I also decided to make the space around my hand and the unfinished area to the left of my body yellow since I felt like it would create a good movement for the audience's eye since the yellow is evenly distributed.
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This is when I started working on the second illustration. I started with working on the people in red with gauche paint. I started with a base of a pinkish tone for the base of the people and slowly added darker reds and then black. I tried using browns for the shadows but it did not have that same ominous look as the color black. I think the reason this part was so easy was because I was only using one color scale so it was easy to understand if a color needed to be lighter or darker.
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I then started painting the arms of the ballerina. Since I was making this a self portrait I did not make the arms a pale blue tint like the original painting. I have more yellow undertones so I started by making a pale skin tone with large amounts of yellow. I put it on the page and it looked too yellow so I went in and added more white. I still felt like it was too yellow but I think it was because of the white background instead of a grey that was making it appear darker. I added shadows around the bottom side of my arms with a soft grey so the shadow was not too harsh and then I left the arms alone. I moved onto the torso which in the reference has a bluish white poofy dress. I had a harder time working on this section since the dress was white but the lighting made it look blue. I wanted to replicate that impressionist style and I started working with acrylic but realized it did not work as well as I wanted it to for this style so I switched to gauche. The gauche was particularly helpful for the skirt since I was trying to make the texture of tool and the gauche layered over each other and make a flowing texture.
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I started painting the skirt. The skirt in "L'Etoile" by Degas looks white at first glance but when you really stare at it you see pastel oranges, blues, and purples. I wanted the skirt in my piece to have this same effect so I took a watered down layer of gauche of each of those colors and I made sure to make the brushstrokes follow the shape of the tutu to add dimension. I then added white over the whole thing but with acrylic. I did not use the usual white paint I use because it is really thick so it would cover up the gauche. Instead I used a cheap quality acrylic paint that was as runny as water and applied a light layer over the whole tutu. This muted the colors a little while adding the shade of white I had wanted. After the white, I went over again in blue gauche since there are a lot of blue shadows in the piece and made a few blue ruffles.
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The last major thing I completed was my face. I was trying to make the portrait accurate to the original but since the painting is in impressionist style, I could not add a lot of details to the face without losing the reference. The ballerina in Degas's piece has black slits for eyes with no indication of a pupil so that is what I did for my portrait. There are a lot of highlights with blue and red which I did not make super thick on my face since I have a different done structure than the original subject and did not have many shadows on my face from the lighting of my room.
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I added the background in this stage which helped me understand the colors of my figure better. Before I was worried about the yellow tint in my skin tone but against the dark grey background, it looks less dark and more pale. I wanted to make the background have a gloomier mood than the original which is a yellow brown color since I wanted this piece to have a negative connotation. The way I made this color was through mixing white, black, and brown. I wanted to include the brush strokes from Degas's work into the background so I did not mix the color completely and let some parts have more black and some more white. As for the tutu, I decided to make the white tulle covering some of the red people to make it look like they were hiding in my skirt. This adds to the meaning of the negativity that gets hidden in the dance world. I also added the flowers and the ribbon around my neck, as well as the blue shadow around my thigh.
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Experimentation
I was noticing that as I was painting, the grid was peaking through the lighter colors. At first I thought this was a problem with the color itself because it was happening on the lightest colors but even as I added black to this yellow it still never became less transparent. I realized that it was a problem with the thinness of the paint and no matter what I mixed into it, it was always going to be runny. What I did to fix this was add multiple layers to the areas I already painted. It took around 3-4 layers before it became a solid color without patchy areas. I prevented this from happening with other colors by erasing the grid lines before I started painting.
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I was messing around with using gauche paint. I have used gauche in the past but I wanted to see how thick these colors were and how much water would be best for them. For the sphere, I made a circle of water over my paper and then added a small amount of paint. When I did this, I saw how the paint spread on the paper and then I waited for it to dry and went over it with a darker layer of blue to add depth.
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I was experimenting with the perfect skin tone for my ballet illustration. The first couple shades of skin tone were too pale since I added too much white but I started over but this time I added blue. When I did this I did not realize how much the blue was going to impact the skin tone since there was yellow in it. It ended up becoming a greenish color that looked nothing like a skin tone so I tried to fix it by adding more white and yellow but that only made the green lighter. I started from scratch with just white, yellow, and a small amount of red. This worked for my skin tone once I added in more yellow. I tried making a light grey that I could add to the skin tone to dull it so it was not so bright but that altered the color too much.
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Critique
Similarities:
I used similar colors for the right side of the spiral that were acrylics and I think the accuracy of the shades is there. The shape of the spiral is pretty similar and I would say there is the same amount of negative space with the black background. I used the same shadowing for the skin tone by using blue gauche paint to dark areas instead of black or brown. I also used gauche to create a faded look on the bottom left side of the illustration. |
Differences:
The colors for the figure are much brighter than those of the original. There are a lot of black shadows in "La Loie Fuller" that I did not use because I wanted the image to be seen as positive and I thought black would drown that meaning out. Another difference is the lettering that I did not include in my image. I thought that it would distract from the dancer and my name does not have strong emotional meaning towards me so I thought it would be unnecessary to include. The original subject is also nude which I was not going to recreate since it would be inappropriate and does not add to the meaning. The pose of myself is also different since I chose to be facing the front rather than the side profile. |
Similarities:
I made the poses of the dancers similar and I made the dress, ribbon, and flowers on the dancer the same. I also added the same brushstroke texture of the background to add movement and the strokes on the tutu to add form. I kept the facial features on my piece somewhat vague to preserve the style of impressionism. |
Differences:
Since I was using myself as a reference, I used my skin tone and not that of the pale dancer. I also used darker shadows so my arm did not blend into the tutu. I also added the red figures which are not apparent in the original image but rather a different inspiration. I put the background as a darker color grey to show a more negative mood. |
Similarities:
I kept the poses of the figures all the same and did not change the attire of the figures. |
Differences:
A big difference is that I made the figures all in red scale to make them seem more malicious. I also did not make the tiny dancers the focus of the artwork but rather on the bottom and I cut off the man furthest to the left. |
Reflection
I had many struggles within this project but I do like the end result. I went into the project thinking that the hardest parts were going to be working in gauche but it ended up being the other way around. I found that the acrylic paint sections were hard to do since I could not easily manipulate the consistency of the paint like I could with gauche. Other than that, I loved the process of making it because some parts felt so satisfying. If I could change the process in any way, I would work on both illustrations at the same time rather than waiting to start the other until one of them is finished. The reason I would change this is because I felt like I spent more of my time working on the first piece and then the second piece I felt rushed and tired of painting. I do love the theme as well. I had many ideas for the theme around my personal experiences with dance but I am happy with the negative and positive opposition that I created.
ACT Questions
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
- I was immediately drawn to the inspirations of Degas, Blake, and Paleologue and from there it changed my idea for each piece completely. I understood how I wanted the negative and positive connotations for the separate pieces to be less visible just by looking at the piece. Paleologue uses bright colors to show the emotion of the dancers while Degas uses soft colors and brush strokes to show delicacy.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
- Some see dance as a free form of movement and expression while others see it as a consuming institution. This can be seen with the varying inspiration choices and how they all share the idea of dancing but some look more exciting than others.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
- I prefer to use gauche over acrylic paint when it comes to blending colors. I found that it was easier since it was a lighter material and I liked the technique of a water based paint.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
-The theme was dance but specifically the emotional response of dancing. I grew up as a dancer and the mentality of it was not always as beautiful as the performances and I wanted to make art that captured that.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
- All of these artists grew up in different time periods that could have heavily shaped their perspective on dancing. Some of the artist inspirations were from further back in history so there perception of dance is probably revolving around ballet and other traditional dance techniques while I also used younger artists that saw dancers for what they were feeling and what they were making others feel.
- I was immediately drawn to the inspirations of Degas, Blake, and Paleologue and from there it changed my idea for each piece completely. I understood how I wanted the negative and positive connotations for the separate pieces to be less visible just by looking at the piece. Paleologue uses bright colors to show the emotion of the dancers while Degas uses soft colors and brush strokes to show delicacy.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
- Some see dance as a free form of movement and expression while others see it as a consuming institution. This can be seen with the varying inspiration choices and how they all share the idea of dancing but some look more exciting than others.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
- I prefer to use gauche over acrylic paint when it comes to blending colors. I found that it was easier since it was a lighter material and I liked the technique of a water based paint.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
-The theme was dance but specifically the emotional response of dancing. I grew up as a dancer and the mentality of it was not always as beautiful as the performances and I wanted to make art that captured that.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
- All of these artists grew up in different time periods that could have heavily shaped their perspective on dancing. Some of the artist inspirations were from further back in history so there perception of dance is probably revolving around ballet and other traditional dance techniques while I also used younger artists that saw dancers for what they were feeling and what they were making others feel.
MLA Citation
- Gontar, Cybele. “Art Nouveau: Essay: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 1 Jan. 1AD, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/artn/hd_artn.htm.
- “Artist Biography - the Vintage Poster.” The Vintage Poster, 24 Feb. 2016, www.thevintageposter.com/artist-biography/?at=(JeandePal%C3%A9ologue)PAL.
- Bentley, G. E. “William Blake | Biography, Poems, Art, Characteristics, and Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Nov. 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake.