"Class of 2017"
Lead on Paper, 2017
"Class of 2017" is a lead on paper concertina that symbolises the end of my schooling experience as part of my Year 12 graduation piece for Visual Art. Each panel of the concertina is a realistic, portrait sketch of friends that I have had during my time at Mindarie Senior College and who have been influential in shaping me into the person that I have become. The people that are shown range from friends that I have known since school beginning primary school to friends that I made more recently at the end of my time at school. This piece won the Mark Folkard Art Acquisition Award and was bought by my high school to remain on display to future students.
Coming from previous experience of freehand drawing, it wasn't until I started my Cert III in Visual Arts that I learnt about the grid technique to keep proportions and details accurate to the reference image. As someone who mainly draws realistic portraits and landscapes, this technique spoke to me and became my main way of getting down an outline at the beginning of any sketching project I started. I brought all the images I had gathered from my friends, once they had been sent to me, into Photoshop and overlaid a 15 x 10cm grid on top of each image to give me a reference image that would fit with the technique I was using.
This project lasted over a couple of months and had an extensive amount of work and hours put into it. Although I was currently undertaking 5 other classes at that time, the majority of my spare time outside of school and my art class was spent working on this project. I spent a lot of time taking photos of my progress over that time span to look at the sketches from a different perspective and see how they looked from a far, in particularly, how realistic they looked. I couldn’t include all of the progress shots that I took over the course of this project (there were a lot!) but here are some of them to show how the project took form.
The hardest part about this project for me was that these were friends that I had known for years and had seen every day at school so I knew when the sketches I had drawn didn’t look right or like them. I ended up spending hours on end going back and redoing them, erasing and re-sketching back in features until I was happy with the final outcome of each one. An example of this was when I was sketching my friend Rhianna. There were some portraits that I would finish in one night or multiple in one night but this was definitely one that I kept coming back to because it just didn’t look true to her and spent multiple days on. The progression shows a difference and was worth it going backwards and forwards trying to perfect this one. I’ve included the original reference picture to show the direction of where I was heading with this sketch and as a comparison of the sketch progress images to the original I was aiming for.
At the end of each year, Mindarie Senior College have an Arts Week where work from the students over multiple classes are showcased to the public to celebrate their efforts over the year. This went over three days showcasing talents from Visual Arts, Media Production, Photography, Drama, Dance and Music. We spent the weeks leading up to the showcase preparing our artworks that we had been producing over the year to make sure they were finalised and ready to be displayed to the public, allowing us time to touchup any small details that we didn't get time to before we submitted our works for grading.
On the night I had multiple family members attend the showcase to support me and the work that I had produced in my last year at Mindarie. I also had friends join us which was extra special as they were featured in this project, getting to see their portraits displayed on the night and take pictures next to their respective portrait. A memorable moment of the night was receiving the inaugural Mark Folkard Art Acquisition Award for "Class of 2017" alongside one of my close friends for her painting that was done for the showcase. Accompanying this award, Mindarie Senior College bought both of our art pieces for $250 each to keep on display in the college for many years to come. This was a sentiment that seemed fitting to the project as it reflected the friendships that were formed and strengthened through school and the memories we made along the years and now the project is permanently stationed there where many of those memories were made.
This artwork got accepted into Northern Perspectives, an annual small art exhibition in Wanneroo that showcases Year 11 and Year 12 students work of that year from schools within the cities of Wanneroo, Joondalup and Stirling. The 2017 exhibition features 41 entries across a range of categories; painting, drawing, etching and mixed media, 3D (sculpture and ceramics), textiles and wearable art, and digital, including photography.
As my work was being exhibited, I was invited to the grand opening of the Northern Perspectives and attended with my mum and sister to see my artwork in my first ever exhibition. This experience was very exciting yet daunting, watching people walk around my artwork admiring it and wondering what they were thinking about it. As a result of this, I didn't spend too much time near where my artwork was placed and enjoyed myself walking around looking at all the other amazing artworks that had been produced by other students from schools in nearby areas. It was really interesting to read their artist statements and get an insight into why they chose to create their artwork and the story behind it.
