June has been a slow month for my collage-making since I’ve been doing a little bit of traveling and recently started my marathon training. However, I did manage to complete my “Oscar Martinez” collage inspired by The Office. This took a little longer to complete than usual, primarily because life has been hectic these days. Again, portraiture doesn’t come easy to me, so I’m glad that I’m working on tackling this series.
Again, life has been a little hectic for me and I haven’t had a chance to make as much art as I was hoping to, but I managed to tackle this portrait of Pam Beesly this month. This is the fourth portrait in my series inspired by The Office. I’m having a ton of fun challenging myself to work on portrait illustrations, striving to get the essence of a given figure captured in a collage.
I’m planning to complete several more in this series. I may only have a new portrait to share once a month since I’m going to start marathon training soon, and that will consume a lot of my free time. However, I’ll still find time to make art, even if it’s not as much time as I used to devote to my craft.
This month I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on my art since I spent a couple of weeks traveling. It’s always nice to take a break from your routine and unplug and unwind. But now I’m back and I had a chance to finish up the third portrait in my series inspired by The Office – and this time I completed a portrait of Jim Halpert (played by John Krasinski).
I spent a good amount of time working on layering the cutouts for the shadows and highlights of Jim’s face. Again, these series that I keep working on are helping me grow and get better as an artist. This type of work also makes me a bit uncomfortable since portraits don’t come easy to me, and I think that’s a good sign that I’m focusing on this type of subject matter. If it’s a challenge, that means there’s a lot of room for growth.
My new collage series inspired by The Office is definitely going to be a fun series to tackle. This is my second portrait in the series, and it had to be Dwight (played by Rainn Wilson) since he was one of my favorite characters from the show.
Portraiture continues to be a subject matter that’s outside my comfort zone, especially when it comes to sharing my work online. If I’m making a portrait of a well known figure, there’s even more scrutiny about whether or not my portrait looks like that person. And honestly, that scrutiny makes me nervous. So working on portraits over the course of several months has slowly taught me how to be okay with depicting portraits my own way. After all, I’m not a photorealist, my works are illustrations. I’m depicting my work with my own style, my own vision, and that doesn’t always mesh with how things appear in real life.
Lately I’ve been pretty busy with a number of things outside of art-making. This year I’m planning to run the NYC marathon, along with a couple of half marathons, so life has consisted of a lot of running and working out. Thus this month I didn’t get around to completing many collages. “Michael Scott” is the only collage that I completed this month, and it was inspired by The Office. I’m planning to make a few more portraits in this series, although my next piece will be an animal portrait inspired by a song that I heard the other day.
Portraiture continues to be a challenge for me, but I’m determined to get to a place where I’m as comfortable making portraits as I am with animal portraits. We shall see how long that takes…