Foundation Portfolio | Annabel Cronin

Ocean

Animals

Project

To begin my ocean animals project, I started by creating this moodboard to look at some of the many different animals.

I was interested in fabric art, and so decided to do this piece of two jellyfish by sticking down different shapes of fabric (with fabric glue) to look like jellyfish.

I wanted to demonstrate my drawing abilities in both graphite pencil and coloured pencil, and did this by drawing these ocean animals.

To further develop my drawing skills, I wanted to experiment with pen drawing. First, I researched into D L Clark, an artist who creates pen drawings of animals.
I then drew my own interpretation of his work, based on a venomous sea snake. I used fine liner pen to draw the snake, ensuring to focus on details and shading, and then used a watered down red paint to represent blood from the snakes mouth.

I was really interested in octopus when researching into ocean animals, as I thought their eight arms would be very interesting to draw and paint. In this page, I experimented with different ways of painting the arms, by looking at different photos.

This photo shows my octopus painting. I am proud of it, as I like the way bright colours were used and different marks made in the octopus and ocean background in order to show texture.

Addiction

Project

I started my topic of Addiction, by creating a mindmap to explore ideas around the topic. I then created a moodboard to further analyse addiction, including things like facts and figures to show the impact it has.

Here I created a moodboard showing different art pieces that I think can represent addiction. It includes many pieces that show the struggle of addiction, as well as the euphoric feeling it can give you.

I wanted to research into an artist who paints the struggles of people, as this would tie in well with my topic of addiction. I stumbled across Jenny Saville, who I thought perfectly demonstrates this.

I carried out a photoshoot, in order to have a reference photo to paint my Jenny Saville piece on. I asked the subjects to pose in a way that shows that they are distressed and unwell.

This shows the photo I decided to paint in the style of Jenny Saville and some development leading up to the painting, including my experimentation with different medias.

Here is my Jenny Saville inspired oil painting. I decided to use oil paints, as this is the media Saville uses and I wanted to replicate this, even though I have not used oil paints before so I wasn't confident in this. However, I am proud of the way I matched Jenny Saville's use of technique in getting the texture of human skin using marks. I also think I captured her use of colour quite well.
I painted the background as lots of bright colours merging together to represent a blurred and spinning vision that many addicts feel from drugs.

I decided to continue with the sub-theme of portraiture, using my photoshoot. I drew some pen and fine liner drawings based on a number of the photos, before combining pen and fine liner together to experiment with technique.

I liked the way biro pen and fine liner looked together, as the biro pen worked well for the lighter areas of the photo and fine liner to add shade to the areas I wanted to be darker. I then decided to develop these drawings by combining three photos showing a progression together in a photo editing app. I then drew these photos using both fine liner and biro pen.

This piece is a development from my drawing experimentation. I used the edited photo of three photos merged together, to create this A3 drawing using biro pen, fine liner pen and charcoal to add extra depth to the drawing.

To expand on my portraiture unit even more, I decided to create some clay sculptures. I knew I wanted to incorporate sculpture into my portfolio somehow and thought that this would be the perfect way to do so.

This shows a research page I created on clay portraits to explore this media further, and look at different techniques in creating them.

I created my clay portraits by moulding different clay pieces around a face-shaped mask.

This is my first clay face sculpture.
I am not as proud of this one as I am of the others, as I don't think it looks very realistic as the features are not accurate. I also think the colours look a bit messy, and the use of black is too harsh. However, this unrealistic perception can be thought of as representing a distorted perception somehow might get from being addicted to something. I also learnt from creating this face how to make the rest of my sculptures better.

This is my second clay portrait. I wanted to make this portrait very colourful to represent how an addict might feel good when intoxicated with their addiction. However, the face of the sculpture shows a clearly miserable person, representing the feelings an addiction can give a person.
I am happy with the way this sculpture turned out, as I like the way the colours go together in a 'gradient' from the outside of the face to the centre. I also think that the way the features (eyes, lips and nose) are glazed in a bland matte glaze, allows them to represent this lifeless image further.

This is the third clay sculpture I created.
For this one I wanted to use more natural colours to represent a more realistic perception than my colourful one. I chose to leave out eyes when creating the face, to show a pained and lifeless person. I also broke the sculpture in half to represent how addiction might leave a person feeling broken.

This is my fourth and final clay sculpture.
For this portrait, I applied smaller pieces of clay to add more detail to the face. I also chose to use darker colours when glazing the clay, which can be seen as representing a darkness someone might feel from addiction. As well as this I left the clay with sections missing to represent a 'broken' feeling once again, as I think this is an emotion one might feel often when suffering from addiction.

Up to this point, throughout my addiction topic, I found myself very interested in exploring drug addiction and specifically the reason why people become addicts. I wanted to explore deeper into the euphoric feeling addicts feel that fuel their addictions and decided to do this by looking at expressions of bright colour and patterns to represent this. I thought that these bright colours and patterns could be seen as representing the feeling drug addicts enjoy feeling when they are on a 'high'.

To start this sub topic, I created this moodboard exploring different colourful abstract patterns to give me ideas on what I wanted to create.

I decided to start my research into abstract patterns by creating some of my own. I thought acrylic paint would work best for this, as it is easy to achieve bright and powerful colours.
These are the first patterns I created. I used a palette knife to spread large amounts of acrylic paint in the primary colours onto the page and then wiped it off, which left me with a very interesting pattern.

These are some further experimentations I painted by using different techniques. Some of these were achieved by simply painting different marks, using a palette knife or using paint combined with fine liner pen.

I then wanted to look at adding the colourful patterns to people. To create these paintings, I cut out pictures of magazine models and spread different colours on their faces using a palette knife. I decided to use this technique, as when I was doing my experimentations, I found this was one of my favourite techniques. I also think this can represent the mind of an addict, as it can be seen as showing them slowly deteriorating, as the paint can be seen to be dropping down.

Foundation Portfolio: Selected Work