Swatch - Up

By the end of this term GCE (Global Citizenship Experience) will be relocating to a new community space that has just been built. For my If These Walls Could Talk course, we were assigned to create and finalized a mural in small groups that will be living in the new community space. We experimented with different mediums and artistic techniques. My peers and I created a series of 5 swatches, and individually reflected on our intentions and experience in choosing the material and or technique that we did. The purpose of this action project was to master the manipulation of different media and techniques and create material swatches for a mural, so that we know exactly what it would look like if it were carried out. In this unit, we examined the stories told through murals and how they were represented through the materials used to create them. We focused on murals from the 1920s (Los Tres Grandes), 1960s, and 1980s. The artistic techniques evolved overtime, from frescoes to stenciling and to xerox transfer. I enjoyed creating my stencil and I am looking forward to making our mural in the new community space.


Name: GN
Title: Global collaboration
Date/Year: 12/10/2015
Measurement: Swatch #1 - “4 inches” by “12 inches”.
Swatch #2 - “5.25 inches” by “12 inches”.
Technique/Medium: Stencil, spray paint (aerosol paint), canvas paper, cutting knife, glue, laser ink printed image, and a sharpie.

Our mural is a tribute mural to GCE’s(Global citizenship experience) student body. The mural is a collage of all of my group members’ facial features. Our collective facial features makeup 3 faces, a smiley, silly, and sad face. These faces represent the student body as a collective. Our mural celebrates the student body, but also calls attention to individuals within it. This concept coincides with that of my unit 1 action project. Each facial feature highlights individuality and the collective faces represents us (GCE student body) communally. The faces are encircled by Earth. The Earth represents students striving to become global citizens. The faces secures the space as ours.

We were inspired by two murals we saw, JR’s “Face2Face” project and the Cutup Collective projects. The Cutup collective is a group of artists, whose work mainly revolves around the manipulation of billboard advertisements. JR is a french artist who takes close up portraits of people who are misrepresented in the media. Our Field Experience to Pilsen also inspired us a lot. We were able to see how mosaics could add depth and texture to a piece. During our brainstorming process, we had a plethora of ideas. The reoccurring idea was collaging. Since we wanted to add a level of complexity, we settled on having the background be Earth.

DR. "Sketch" 2015 

Stenciling is an artistic technique which produces an image by applying pigment to a flat surface over an object with designs in it which creates the image. Stenciling allows the pigments to reach certain parts of the surface. A stencil is the resulting image and the object used. Stenciling dates back over 35,000 years ago, hand stencils were made by blowing pigment through bones over a hand held against a wall. Stenciling has many key advantages.

I chose stenciling because it is cost effective, it can be reused to rapidly reproduce the same design or image, it gives the piece a simplistic look, and allows the addition of details. This technique enhances the sketch by making it simplistic and sleek. Creating a stencil is a tedious process. We used Pixlr, a software program that adjusts the contrast and brightness of the final collaged images so that we had defined dark and light areas. We printed the image, pasted it onto a cardboard paper, and clearly outlined the areas of the image that will be cut out for the stencil. Then, I cut out the areas of the image where I wanted paint to appear, attached the stencil to canvas paper, applied the spray paint, and removed the stencil and inspected my work.

The final look had sleek lines and looked simplistic, which was what I intended. Unfortunately, we would not be using this technique in our final mural. Majority rules!

GN, "Stencil" 2015

Our final materials and techniques that our group chose to be the most effective to carrying out the final mural were mosaic and wheat-pasting. We felt that the mosaic added texture and eccentricity, and wheat-pasting helped create a realistic collage image.

JV. “Wheat Paste Swatch”. (2015)

The mosaic will consist of miscellaneous tiles and grout to fill in the spaces between the tiles. The mosaic adds depth and makes our piece pop out more. Mosaics are long-lasting and retains color. Wheat-pasting is simple paste mixture made of water and flour and creates a realistic image.

MV, “Happy Face Swatch”. (2015)