Kayla Alston
As my time throughout high school has progressed I have learned an immense amount about art. Since a young age, I have always enjoyed creating art, featuring figures with a special focus on women’s faces. For numerous years in elementary school, my art depicted women’s faces with a bang covering one eye. Although this may seem strange, I did this because I struggled to create symmetrical eyes. As I grew older I began doodling in other classes almost every day. I enjoyed drawing lips, hair, eyes, and noses. It wasn’t until I joined Deborah’s class that I learned how to use shadow and light to create a more realistic final product. Most of my art still features figures. I still greatly enjoy making women’s faces, but I especially enjoy creating faces with afrocentric features. I like using cultural hairstyles in my work. Overall, my passion for my black heritage is shown in many of the depictions of women throughout my artwork. Recently I have been enjoying creating women’s bodies with an emphasis on their torsos. I think the curves of a woman’s body are interesting to look at and exciting to recreate on paper. I am currently working on diptych. Both parts feature a hand in different positions. In the background, there is warm-toned splotchy paint and small white flowers. I added pictures on the outer parts of the canvas and some white illustrations around the pictures. I have never attempted to draw hands so this has been an interesting project for me. I decided that I needed to challenge my artist ability by drawing these hands. I attempted to use past lessons taught by Deborah about mapping out shapes and shadowing as well as highlighting. I have found that art is very similar to math where you can apply a given formula to a set of problems to achieve your end goal.