Assignment #4: Visual Art

From the assignment bank I choose a visual assignment, specifically drawing a musical Puppet This assignment originated from Lynda Barry AKA “The Nearsighted Monkey”  

For this assignments the rules are

  1. While watching the Tame Impala video “I’m A Man” 
  2. make four separate drawings on a single piece of paper divided into quadrants. For each drawing you make, set a two-minute timer to tell you when to stop.
  3.  Choose one of the band member puppets to focus your attention on and make your drawing about. 
  4. Make each drawing in a separate pose. 
  5. Do not stop the video while drawing! Try to capture the energy and motion in each of your drawings. 
  6. Do a cartoon-style drawing, not a fully rendered fine-art work. 
  7. Focus on capturing the essence of the character in each different pose.
  8. The whole project should take a total of 8 minutes which means you can only watch the video a total of two times. 

I decided to change the original foot -print of the assignment and to make it more visually appealing to myself and the viewers. I decided to use color pencils to try and capture the color of the puppets to make it look more aesthetically pleasing and realistic to the real puppets. I also decided to add more time so I could have enough time to draw them. In addition I didn’t incorporate rule number six because I wanted to make the drawing as similar to the real puppet as I could. Also, In reality each drawing did take me 8 minutes for each muppet because I also added color, but I did only watch the video twice to make follow the rules.  

This is the original image of the puppet in the music video”Im A Man” this is one of the guitar player. This puppet has dread locks hair and orange skin tone.

This is my image of one of the guitar players.

This is a image of the lead singer in the music video Im A Man” this puppet is also plays the guitar. This puppet has orange brown hair and yellow skin color
This is my sketch of the lead singer and guitar player
This is the original puppet for the music video he is a blue character with black hair. He is one of the guitar players and background singers
This is an image of my sketch of the blue character in the music video.
This is a image of the piano player in the music video. This puppet has curly blonde/orange hair. And a orange skin tone.
This is my sketch of the piano player from the music video.
This is the drummer. This puppet has a yellow skin tone and back curly hair.
This is my interpretation of the drummer.

 I like this assignment because we got to choose what type of media we wanted to create for example visual, design, audio, video, mashup, writing, fanfic, and animated gifs. 

In order to complete this assignment successfully, something that I did was read the description of the assignment and look at some examples of how other students have executed the assignment just so I have an idea. In addition, I think I am pretty good at drawing. I don’t think for this assignment you need to necessarily know how to draw very well but it is an advantage if you do because you don’t have a lot of time to fix mistakes, and since these are moving images it is even more challenging to draw them. 

I think we should be doing these assignments weekly because they are very fun but I think the more I do them the better digital storyteller I become and then these projects become better and cooler than the last. I really want to see improvement in my  video and design skills. Sometimes I feel like I have some really good ideas in my head but executing them can be a real challenge for me. The first time I ever made a gif or a meme was because of this class and it was a really great project. I had a fun time thinking about all the different memes i wanted to create and how I was going to execute them in terms of which image I was going to use and what type of language and content I was going to use to make the viewer engaged and relevant and of course funny, it was all a lot of thinking but it was a fun process.  Also what really has inspired me and made me more interested in this class was the class work and projects of my class members. Everyone has such cool and funny ideas and I got to learn more about them and the things they like and find funny. 

3 thoughts on “Assignment #4: Visual Art”

  1. Hey Sara, I really liked the visual assignment you choose. I watched the music video the first and listened to it while reading your post. Your drawings were really accurate and I feel like you transmitted the vibes from the video to the paper. Good Job and good taste in music also. 👌🏾

  2. Really great work on this!
    Such fun! I want to try this assignment too! Thank you for the great work and how you organized the post as we descend and discover each new character / drawing.
    I think it would help a lot to add the hyperlink to the assignment itself as well as a screen shot of the assignment too, this helps for context and gives a visual that also helpful.

    Thank You!

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