Natalie G11 & 12 Artist Portfolio '15 - '17

With this piece, I had the idea of continuing with the social issue that I used last year for my triptych piece, how teens struggle with bullying and self worth.  Originally, I had the idea of using a mix of pencil and watercolour for my piece along with the idea of realism.  The idea of the two medias would allow me to show contrast through my colours using the greyscale tones in the pencil and the colourful hues in watercolour.  I thought that I would be fine with the aspect of sketching using pencil, however, as I did my media experiments, my techniques and skills in watercolour were not up to the standard of being able to make it realistic.  I explored the idea of using soft focus for my drawings, however, I felt that it was quite difficult in order to get the same effect using pencil and watercolour.  I also explored using a more simplified technique of taking out the skin tones of the girls and leaving their skin colour blank.  However, again, it didn't seem to quite work.  I ended up using photography as my medium, manipulating the photographs in Photoshop in order to create the same composition as my original idea.  I filtered the photos that I took using a watercolour filter, and using a watercolour brush, I added watercolour marks in different colours and shapes that would correspond to the dresses that my friends were wearing.  For the girl in black and white, I taken down the saturation of the original photo, then applying an image mask, I allowed splashes of colour to come through to show how her life was being drained by these girls.