Reflection

1. To create my self-portrait I started by finding a pallet on the pantone website, and made a colour gradient for the background using two colours I thought would blend nicely. Starting with a lighter blue colour from the top left corner to a shade of pink on the bottom right. I wanted to accentuate my piece by using geometric shapes to highlight certain areas and create depth. I used a marquee tool to make the oval in the centre of my face, to accentuate the eyes. I used tools such as the polygonal lasso tool and marquee tools to create shapes throughout the image. I continued to use colours that worked well with the background and used colours, which contrasted and stood out to highlight my face and eyes.

2. I like this image the most because it is the most playful with shapes of each piece I made. I think the shapes are effective in moving the focal point of the image around, with special focus on the eyes and face, as Warhol does in many of his portraits. I think the mixture of colours work very effectively throughout the portrait.

3. I believe that the use of brushes could be improved on this piece, as the portrait mainly focuses on shapes and colours rather than brushes. You a can only see a use of brushes in 2 different circumstances, on the eyes and on the shape on the right of my face. I believe I could have used brushes to fill shapes differently by using different patterns from the brushes more effectively than I have done in this portrait.

4. I’ve learnt about how Warhol made his work, but also got a deeper understanding of what he tries to achieve and the meanings his portraits give. I’ve discovered how Warhol uses colour and tried to recreate as he does, by highlighting certain parts of the portrait. I have also achieved a deeper understanding of how Photoshop works, ahead of my predominately basic prior knowledge. I’ve learnt about using brushes, marquee tools, and colour pallets together to make stronger images all together.

Analysis

1.Andy Warhol was an American artist born in 1928 who was influential in the rise of “pop art”. His work was largely inspired by what was popular and common at the time and particularly flourished during the 1960s. The general outline of pop art was made using a photo someone else has taken, and changed the colours and style to make an entire new piece. Warhol became particularly well known because of his work involving Campbell’s soup and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe. Soon, his work was highly sought after and was used for campaigns and advertising.

2.The work involves the figure of which the art is about in the centre of the artwork, the picture will often contain colours not in the original photo and will use designs and shapes to emphasize certain parts of the work. Warhol uses contrasting colours very effectively in all of his work to bring your attention to certain areas. In this picture, Warhol uses blue in the eyeliner and red in the lips to heavily contrast against the yellow, which covers a majority of this piece. The background is a single colour in this piece, but in others he uses a mixture of colours against each other to create a strong outline of the dominant figure of the work. This piece is particularly interesting because the hair of the women is the same colour as the background, yet the eyes and mouth stand out so brightly.

3. Warhol uses images from magazines that other people took. He uses silkscreen to create a screen print and uses colours alternative to what the image looked like in originally.

4. I think that his artwork is used to communicate different ways to show an image, and also to emphasize parts of the image that may have not been emphasised originally. His use of colour makes his work so much different that you get an entirely different impression from his version and the original. Warhol’s work does and would’ve been thought of as provocative as it is so different and loud in comparison to the original. The images are making a statement about the person who is in the art and the artist himself.

5. I like the art because I believe that Warhol is very good at making using colours to create images, which can be so different to the original. His use of colour on each image is very clever because it can be so simple but used so precisely and cleverly. There isn’t many artists/artwork that use contrasting colours so effectively as Warhol does. Warhol manages to turn the same image in to four or more separate images, each different, yet each as effective as the last, which is original and not seen very often.