New Ideas and New Challenges

With every image that is captured it always leaves a lasting mark that people can hold onto for generations to come. Over the course of time, we have seen countless photographs and paintings that have always been redesigned and tweaked. In which it inspires artists to almost redesign it from their perspective and almost highlight it to entice viewers back to want to pay homage to the original pieces that we all know and love. Which transforms the art and photographs into something that is new, fun, and exciting. It is this sense of creativity and imagination that inspires me to do this with other peoples’ photographs and my own. I get a chance to see how they look from my perspective, and I get to express myself more by adding my own personal flare.

The artwork I do is that I use pictures that I have taken, or I use pictures that are given to me by clients, friends, or family and I redesign them with either chalk, charcoal, paint, pen, pencil, or markers. I first cut out the size of the paper I am asked, or I choose to do with a pare of scissors. The first thing I do is I take the image I am given, and I print it out to size I need it to be and then I place on a large artist light. My next step is to place some tracing paper on top of the image, and I trace over the image to get all the lines and the darks and lights. There are times where I will use a projector and I tape my paper against the wall to trace the image.

One of my favorite styles is where I use a lot of different colors schemes to recreate the image. Sometimes I will do a blue color scheme, triadic, or even tetradic to keep the colors fun and exciting. When I am rebuilding the image, I will cut out different colored papers that I painted they sometimes will be cut into strips or random shapes. But I also love to use the hole puncher and I can just build the image back together piece by piece. The process using hole punched painted paper can be very tedious because they are so small, and they are glued onto the surface individually. But I enjoy taking my time doing it and it just really calms and eases my mind after a bit of a rough day. So far, I have only done portraits, but I would love to try this style with cut up paint paper using a landscape reference picture. Whenever I am doing the portraits the major focal point, I always want to perfect is the eyes and the smile because, it is always those to two things of any portrait that grabs the viewers attention the most. To perfect both of those focal points really captures the emotions of how that person was feeling that. The first time I did this technique was that I used a portrait picture of myself that was taken on Valentine’s Day. I know since it was taken on Valentine’s Day it should be in pink, but I preferred to do it in a blue color scheme because blue has always been my favorite color and I always love wearing blue do I thought if I am going to my own portrait, might as well use a color I love. Whenever I want to do my own art for myself, I love using the colors and techniques that I think will work best and this can be where the imagination comes through. Like for this portrait I added a flower in the portrait piece because I love flowers and if it is Valentines Day that this picture was taken there must at least be some element being used that represents that day.

Another technique I love using when I recreate a picture is I use black ink pens and I just leave it black and white. I really enjoy using this technique the most because I always have a good eye with seeing the darks and the light in images that not every person can see. I first got into doing this technique back in college for my art class and this was part of the assignment was highlighting the darks and the lights. My images I ended choosing were pictures of my equestrian teams’ late horse and I loved him so much and I just wanted to honor him by tweaking some of the best memories we had of him. I admit it was very sad at sometimes doing them, but it also helped ease my heart from the loss. Like in the lyrics of Ed Sheerans’ famous song Photograph “We keep this love in a photograph, We made these memories for ourselves” pictures serve as our memories so that way we never forget the good times we have in life. Or whenever there are times in our life where we almost forget these memories, we always have a picture to turn to, so they are never forgotten. That is what I love about the pictures that I am given when I remake these for people because, they want to see their best memories highlighted to a different level of complete utter beauty. Also, the stories that they share with me about picture of what the day was like for them or the journey it took for them to get these photographs just lets my creative juices flow even more. When I paint or draw when I am doing one of these, I want to be able to feel the emotions that they felt that day and that way I can always add a little flare to make the image pop more. Whether it be the color scheme or how they want the image to look I always want the art to just grab their attention and leave them speechless seeing it in a new light.

There are times where I come home from work or school and the first thing, I always end up doing when I walk in the door is I run straight to my artwork. With a cup of coffee or even a glass wine and a little music I always end finding a lot of comfort and joy when I just let my imagination go wild. I feel like whenever life gets rough sometimes the best way that I can always let out my stress and anxiety is to always pick up a paintbrush or a pencil and just draw. I even sometimes redraw my own memories that were just too special for a camera to capture and I can share them with the rest of the world from my own perspective. As an artist there is never a bad time for me to draw or paint because I am always happy whenever I do it and I can just let my thoughts and feelings through a paintbrush. When I was a kid, I was always by myself and I was a bit of a loner and I think that this is where my talent, love and passion for art just grew and continues to grow. But for now, I work hard at both my jobs during the day and at night I am staying up late just working nonstop on my art. There has been many times where I am just thinking about a lot of things that I just want to be able to let out on a piece of paper, and it just gets me excited to come home and just let it all out. I hope to get my art more known one day, but I love just seeing how much more I can keep challenging myself with new pieces and seeing how hard I am willing to push myself and rise to new challenges and new ideas.