For this self designed assignment, my goal was to draw 30 minutes each day for around a week. However, I obviously did not think it through because I quickly realized that it would take a lot more time to execute something I wanted. Initially, I had in mind drawing a new drawing each day, but it quickly deflated down to working on the same drawing continuously. For the first 2 days, I worked on a piece based off a picture I took in Venice. I had painted the image before, but it was something I wanted to redo in a different way. It was merely something I wanted to draw and I exceeded the 3
0 minute limit by a lot. While at first, I didn’t really think it could correlate to identity much, I later thought it could possibly connect with my love of traveling and how that relates to my identity. While working on the piece, I decided to try using metallic pan pastels wet, and I really liked the shimmery gold effect it gave off, so I decided I wanted to incorporate that into the next 30 minutes.
For the next couple of days, I stuck strictly to the 30 minutes to see what I could produce under that time restraint, and I realized it wasn’t much. I don’t think I ever realized how long it took to plan and start a piece because I generally don’t consciously think about it. The second piece revolved around my identity of being Chinese-American. It depicts a tattoo-esque image (mainly focused on line art and stippling) of a traditional Chinese dragon (which is the creature that coordinates with the year that I was born). Ever since I was young, my parents have instilled in me that it was valuable to be knowledgeable about Chinese culture and to learn the language. I never really saw where they were coming from and didn’t really value it until I was older. I shied away from the Chinese side of my identity, and a lot of my early teenage years were spent struggling to find a balance between the two and dodge any stereotypes that I could possibly fit under. The drawing shows the dragon tangled in its own whiskers to demonstrate the confusion and restrictions I set upon myself in an attempt to appease both aspects of my Chinese-American identity.
I never got to actually finish the drawing due to the time constraint. The stippling never got done, but I kind of like how it looks with the underlying loose sketch and how deconstructed and messy it looks.
