Arts Foundation – Portrait Collage

10 January 2019Stella M, Alexandra ‘20

The current project in the afternoon elective of Arts Foundation is making a collage from a portrait. Students are asked to integrate the idea of their identity, which is the starting point, with other identities like family members and/or other people whom they have an attachment to. Ari U, Allard ‘20 states: “I enjoy that you have a lot of different possibilities of what you can do to express yourself.” We work in a layered process that keeps changing the relationship to the image. It began with a conventional approach for printing the image where you use a photograph of yourself or a family member that we took beforehand. The picture is cut to scale with the paper and the students draw it in a simple, not too detailed fashion that still shows the features well using pencil and a grit. After this step is finished parts of pictures of other family members are cut out and added to the drawing. We then shift into bringing in colour from watercolour and value and texture from frottage and inkwork. Later, steps include some kind of inscription or personal symbol that gives the work a little more meaning like magazine cutouts and other artistic elements. Students focus on either cropping or framing to create emphasis. We have been working on this project since April and most people have already made significant progress. In this art, everyone can practise their traditional drawing skills with pencil on paper and pep it up with colourful cutouts. The picture tells a story about the person’s family by showing the resemblance, the mood and memories that the add-ons bring. Mr Luna our teacher says “We’re interested in the roots of portraiture in showing your membership in some kind of community, creating a kind of motive, representation of yourself that is not exactly just you as you are but some idea about you that takes you beyond the basic limitations of how you look.” Stella M, Alexandra ‘20

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