Finding my Creativity

To be completely honest, this is one of the first personal projects I have completed simply because I was inspired to do so in a long time. This is not a fanart, this is not a photo I found on the internet made in my style–this is genuinely my own thing. I used one of my own photos I took at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) a few years ago when I was a junior in college. I was visiting with a few friends for a class when we ended up having an impromptu photoshoot. I never posted any of these photos online, but I use them as drawing references when I do vector art.

As for what inspires me to do art, I tend to like faces and emotion more than anything. I tend to look for inspiration in the faces and emotions of subjects across all media I have a chance to observe. I'm inspired by artists like Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist during ww1 and ww2 and SWOON, a street artist. Both of these artists have the ability to evoke intense emotions through their work and motivate me to create art that has a similar effect on my audience.

I have only recently started to try to get back in the saddle of creativity, or at least my version of creativity. I have been learning how to create 3-D Portraits online through an amazing artist, Ale Rambar. I have started several pieces, but have only recently fully finished a few to the point where I finally feel comfortable sharing at least one. The one I chose to submit here is an internal project for me that has been a long time coming. I’m doing a small series of characters from a DND podcast and I'm having a fun time searching for inspiration for portraits to fit the characters.

However for this project here, I wanted to use one of those photos from LACMA I mentioned before. This project required me to spend two whole nights sketching it out and drawing how I wanted the final piece to look. The first night, I built it up layer by layer. On the second night, I vectored the images, and went to the store to print out the many different layers.

I spent the third night of this project precisely cutting each layer with an exacto knife and scissors.

I used foam tape to build up the layers in between to get the desired 3-D effect. There are nine layers, or thirty-two unique pieces each individually and painstakingly cut out with an exacto knife, ball embroidery stylist, and scissors.

The fourth night I framed the portrait and painted it using watercolors.

By the time I was finished, I felt accomplished and proud of the work I’d completed. As I looked at my final piece I saw the same face I had seen some time ago at LACMA. I saw a proud, hopeful, and yearning soul.