acrylic on paper
2018
9 in x 12 in
Spring of my junior year of high school, select students in my art class participated in The Memory Project, a Syrian refugee portrait project put together by UNICEF. Under the project, we were each assigned an image of a Syrian refugee student, whom we were to artistically recreate. In following, the portraits were hand-delivered to the refugee camps.
This project was completed at the earlier part of my art career. I was not very comfortable with many mediums, working only briefly with colored pencil and graphite before this project. Ultimately, I decided that acrylic paint would be best medium to use considering the piece was going to go to the child. I knew acrylic would dry fast, and I was always down for a challenge, but boy did I have it cut out for me.
I quickly realized acrylic and I were not friends. Not even frenemies. We danced in that awkward, getting to know each other phase through the whole month that I procrastinated finishing this piece. I am nit-picky about many things in life, and in my art, this characteristic of mine is amplified. I was working with brush sizes ranging between 0 and 3 (0.8mm-2.0mm points), which only allowed me to cover a small area at a time, and the paint dried so. fast. I was simply not prepared. Not only did it take me forever because I had to layer the colors but, with each layer drying so fast, I was layering multiple layers of paint over dry layers and had trouble blending.
brittany given. 