For my emotional mask project, the emotions that I attempted to portray were anger and frustration. I chose the song “no apologies” by Eminem, because his songs generally convey a lot of emotion. In order to convey the feeling of anger in my piece, I concentrated on contorting the shape of his eyebrows and mouth into a frown. In order to emphasize the frown, I created wrinkles on his forehead, and exaggerated the upturned shape of his mouth.
When creating my mask, I started by constructing a hump mould out of newspaper. I used the newspaper to create the general shape of the human bone structure (with eye sockets and cheekbones) to simplify the process of actually making the features with clay. Using my fingers to shape the features on the mask was a fairly straightforward process, though I had to use some tools to form some of the smaller features such as the wrinkles between his brows, or his eyes. Once my mask was fired, I used acrylics to paint the mask in a realistic sort of way. I used tonal contrast to emphasize some of his features, such as his wrinkles. In mixing the paints, I couldn’t always get the exact same colour so some of the colours on my mask are a bit mottled, but overall I think the paint came out quite nicely.
My goal was to create a mask that portrayed a sense of anger, as is conveyed in the song that I chose. I feel like my mask, however, expresses lighter emotions such as irritation or annoyance, rather than the more intense sort of anger that I wanted it to, and in that sense I believe I was somewhat unsuccessful. On the other hand, I think I was pretty successful in making the mask itself look realistic.
When creating my mask, I started by constructing a hump mould out of newspaper. I used the newspaper to create the general shape of the human bone structure (with eye sockets and cheekbones) to simplify the process of actually making the features with clay. Using my fingers to shape the features on the mask was a fairly straightforward process, though I had to use some tools to form some of the smaller features such as the wrinkles between his brows, or his eyes. Once my mask was fired, I used acrylics to paint the mask in a realistic sort of way. I used tonal contrast to emphasize some of his features, such as his wrinkles. In mixing the paints, I couldn’t always get the exact same colour so some of the colours on my mask are a bit mottled, but overall I think the paint came out quite nicely.
My goal was to create a mask that portrayed a sense of anger, as is conveyed in the song that I chose. I feel like my mask, however, expresses lighter emotions such as irritation or annoyance, rather than the more intense sort of anger that I wanted it to, and in that sense I believe I was somewhat unsuccessful. On the other hand, I think I was pretty successful in making the mask itself look realistic.