Gesso Piece

For this piece, we were asked to right a story that is meaningful to us on poster paper. We had to completely cover the poster with writing in any font and in any direction. Then we cover it with gesso and taped the spots that we wanted to keep readable. Then we were to think of an image from the story that we could create on top of the gesso surface. For my project, I chose the memory of my 18th birthday when my friends and I camped out in my friend's backyard. I wrote down the story and on top of the gessoed surface I made a collage of fire using small squares of construction paper. When I was done, I felt it was missing something, so I got a plastic stencil of a small square and made small squares all around the outside of the fire. This created a huge cubist them. 

For this assignment, I would give myself a 4. It has the range of 2-D design principles, like color, shape, contrast, balance, and emphasis. The work is an original idea that portrays the story well. The work expresses a small part of the story. The image could have been different so that it would fit the point of the story a little bit better. The work does engage the onlooker and the person can see certain phrases in the story, that were not gessoed, and that share key parts in the story. Overall, the piece is good.