Week 4: Painter Corel X...more proposal ideas

Confronted with a third highly powerful piece of software and only a short time to get to 'know' it, and this one without a freeware version to use at home, I cannot imagine pursuing this software. I didn't so much experiement with strokes and layers and the 700 tools, but drew how I felt, which was not well and software overwhelmed. So, I drew a child-like drawing - because I felt childlike (put in the position of being a novice yet again) and because I found a combination of brush types and textures I liked: chalk which was sharp, grainy or dull or various thickness on a paper surface of my choice, and I chose a simulation of a natural cotton fibre paper. So I experiemented with colour mixing and fill - plain and patterned - and drew a child-like family drawing.

DRAWING

A lesson I learnt was, never draw on the canvas, put everything on a layer which allows you more flexibility in turning layers on and off or rubbing bits out to show layers below, or swapping layers around. However, given my lack of Corel at home, I'll be using this as a JPEG, not Corel format.

As I drew I had more ideas about identity, family, masks, which is interesting me for my proposal. I imagined what I could do with this childish drawing. An adult drawing such a drawing of a family has a particular meaning - apart from 'she's suffering from a reality attack about her abilities' - and how that might be combined / blurred / rubbed through / mixed up /morphed with other non/idealised pictures of families.

Here is such an idealised family:

They are easy to find and often used to sell something as in moving services (abcmovingcenter.com).

Mind you, even 'happy families' can be disturbing as on Dude I Rock http://www.dudeirock.com/ where the writer digitally alters all sorts of photos to insert himself: in this case all members of this family are versions of him.

Further, I imagined taking a series of photos of one person morphing from one expression to another: from a public mask of politeness into their truth feelings of whatever, perhaps boredom and disgust. On Flickr, I found a Japanese artist, Ogawa Mari http://www.flickr.com/photos/8497209@N08/2988405919/, who has included as series of shots of masks of her wearing a mask of her own face:

Here's an exhibition called Artifacial Expression, for instance, http://artifacial.org/the_varieties and http://artifacial.org/face_shift, that document changes in normal facial expression in a way that suggest reduction to digitisation for computer programs in robots.