Mingchi Shao

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For the “way of seeing” section, I paid attention to things around me and the photos I’ve taken during the gallery visit recently.

The first 4 paintings are anything that I saw from my room, after I sketched the shape from one thing, I will move to the next thing I saw no matter what shape and what angle. There is no subject for them. I scanned them into photoshop and duplicate them into patterns.

I found my charging cables and my shoelace are also twisted, so I mixed them together into one drawing, sketched them with color pencils in different shades, and then duplicate them into the skeleton look. Inspired by that, I placed yarns and strings on a paper randomly, glued and sewed firmly. This experiment was used as the background of a pattern, above that, I layered a simple face pattern cut from a magazine.

Some of it is just playing with photoshop. I’m not familiar with it, so taking this opportunity to explore different effects. What I should try more next time would be 3D experiments but not only working on flat paper. I wasn’t inspired at first when I decided to make mix-media work, this is because I wasn’t thinking of it as a process. As I was working on the charging cable, I found out this is the part that I could develop.

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I drew these package with different tools. The green one has no outlines, only color blocks. The other one was drawn with black lines at first, in the end, it looks like a design sketch. The right one was the first drawing in this task, I feel safe when I can just fill the color in the blank if I already sketched the shape out.

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I looked around my home and also took pictures when I was out, so for this section of the drawings (The scene from SpongeBob SquarePants is my phone wallpaper and the “fishfrog” is just a weird idea as I was in the market) I used 2-3 tools in one drawing to make sure it shows different layers and also maintain its own texture. The fashion illustration is the cover of Figaro, it took me around 3 minutes to do this quick doodling with crayons. The drawing in the middle was created with watercolor and color pencil, I feel it is easy to control and it has an exact boundary, it might be a little bit conservative but it’s interesting to explore how can they mix together.

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I experimented with mark-making in these 3 drawings. The paper was divided into 4 parts and used pencil, acrylic, crayon to create different texture combinations. For the green one and the blue one, I played with the bottle cap and tapped them randomly on the paper.