Part 4 Exercise 6: Visual Distortion

 

I chose a dog for this exercise, specifically a bull terrier I follow on Instagram called Sam. I think the breed in general have such goofy personalities and they’re strange shaped faces really fit the distortion element because it was fairly easy to warp and add different pieces of magazine to create a more obscure expression. Due to his face being so plain the different pieces I included had a nice contrast of white as the background.

Before collaging I began with a sketch to get used to the placements of features and the general tones, the second version I used the continuous line technique to create long likes that took the shape of the face, I have labelled what lines I did in order and to keep count in case used too many lines. After these sketches I felt like I could position cut outs and such in a way that matched my sketch proportions.

 To create this collage, I used a pieces of a mattress image for the whole face and another bed picture followed by a crossword grid for the front of the face under the nose and a piece of Dalmatian to represent the spots of black round the mouth. The nose was just a black background from a page and the pink parts where of a bowl of pink ice cream. For some shadows and darker areas, I used magi one pages with text on and and the hair off someone’s head and clothes. The beige parts were patches of a coat in the magazine to try blend the colours in like the original. As for the eyes one is a human eye, and one is a camera lens. They way I’ve angled them gives a more guilty or fearful expression the dog from the original photo. I think what I’ve created is kind of like a mischievous dog who’s done something he’s not supposed to.

After creating a collage in the shape of a dogs face I took a pencil to piece of paper and producing a drawn collage, adding pen and shading to capture all the tones, details and shapes to create a final piece (painting)

 

My thought process behind my final distortion was of creating an expression that had a completely different tone to the actual picture, it seemed mine was a playfully worried look and the concept I chose was someone holding a half-eaten shoe to his face and him trying not to look at it. You can really see the guilt in his eyes. I made a short list of scenarios and the shoe just felt right. I also made some mini sketches of these scenarios like a dog train and his face being compared to an egg like this picture I’ve seen around the internet.

 For the final piece the other element I added was a chewed-up shoe. I did this in Acrylic, when working with this medium in the past I’ve always found the colours were always bold. The way it can be quickly mixed and how it the pigments behave helped me emphasising the distorted elements through the brush strokes and the intensity of the colour. The colour is also a lot bolder than the drawing. It brings this obscure creation to life.  Painting the shoe, I wanted to include a bit of realism to. I think the contrast between real and not real makes it a quirky picture, it’s like there’s an actual story behind it “my strange paper dog”. The expression now has a mischievous context. The random details and mismatch of the dog really made the image interesting, the sloppiness of the text lines and creates some diversity between the white and greys, it also kind of helps with making shadows and to show the pieces of paper are overlapped. As for the background I wanted to highlight both parts of the picture, the darkness helps draw attention to the dog as he stands out being white against the black background whereas adding lighter blue around the front of the shoe also does the same things. There’s a lot of opposites within the image. Abstract and realism, light and dark. Another thing about the background is with the brush strokes I tried to replicate the abstract flow to take away from making it too realistic. Finally, to define some of the lines I used a black fine liner and brush pen to fill in and make darker some parts and also used a white biro to add some light and clean up some of the lines.