Jason Derulo and the Argonauts

(NOTE THIS ISSUU POST IS FLAGGED AS POTENTIALLY UNSAFE, IT MIGHT NOT BE VIEWABLE IF YOUR SETTINGS ARE ON SAFE MODE) The important thing is that I got it done. The final paintings I did were not as technically good as I would have liked. In the end I decided on using acrylic because it was the quickest and easiest way for me to make this imagery, I got flat colour out of it too. I would have used gouache but I had problems with going over the black background with the orange, as gouache becomes wet again so they would mix a little. Plus I did these paintings a little bigger, on just about A3 paper so I wanted to use a paint that would stretch further and I could use a lot of.

I tried to simplify the moments I chose which were; Britney Spears shaving her head, Shia Laboeuf's JUST DO IT, Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at an award ceremony and Kim Kardashians Break the Internet image. I wanted the images to look more in that greek style than my previous ones so I tried to distort the shapes of the body and poses so that they looked more like this. I noticed in the Greek pottery almost everyone is facing the side, so I made all the faces profile's rather than doing any 3/4 or front on views. I think the effect gets across but I know this is not as neat as it could have been, if I had been able to dedicate more time to this I would have liked to have refined them more, or done more practice of this in my sketchbook but alas I messed up.

With some digital trickery I managed to create some almost acceptable final images. Of course I'm not as thrilled with them as I could be but given the amount of stress this entire project has been I'm quite pleased with what I managed to throw together.

I used Ben's advice and applied the images to a vase shape which I think pulls everything together a lot better as it brings a sense of unity to all the images, as well as framing the central piece. By digitally enhancing the images I was able to get a more opaque colour on each scene, and also add some texture, which was some lino textures I had made in a previous project. I think the texture is one of my favourite things about these pieces as it gives an aged look to the vases and also stops the pieces looking digitally made, I love having traditional elements in my work as I'm finding when I make work that looks truly digital it doesn't have the same feel as a majority of my work.

I  propose these images as a post-card book kind of thing, and was wondering what to call it. A friend suggested "Gash of the Titans" but I felt that this didn't really relate to the subject too much. Molly then said "Jason Derulo and the Argonauts" which I thought was really funny! So I decided to do an extra piece that could be a front cover for this hypothetical book. The image I referenced for it was something that went viral saying Jason Derulo fell down the stairs at the Met Ball (it wasn't actually him but he is still associated with the image, and since this is focused on pop culture it seemed appropriate). I struggled a lot with positioning the text as I did want it to have the same layout as the other images, but as there was a lot more text this was just not possible. I tried having "Jason Derulo" at the top but this just looked as if that was an author name. In the end I did have to change the format of the image and make the vase smaller, which I think would definitely work as a cover and gives a bit of variation.

The text is something that I think is successful, again it could have been executed a bit better but I think the way it has a hand-drawn element suits my the tone of the images. The mock-ancient greek style of it also suits the style of the images.

Some problems I have with my final pieces other than the technical painting skills and such are the fact that I think that I have almost done the opposite of what I intended to do with this project. My initial proposal stated that I wanted to modernise Greek mythology, focusing on the Gods, and I've ended up... bringing pop culture back into a Greek style rather than the other way around. I didn't really realise as I was doing it but I would have preferred to still include the Gods in the imagery, like the Gods as the celebrities like I had drawn Aphrodite AS Kim Kardashian whereas these final images, it's just Kim Kardashian drawn in a Greek style. There are so many elements of the project that just got lost along the way because of my bad time management and I am disappointed with myself because of it.