Last Year's Junior Thesis

Hey guys, some people ask me about thesis stuff, so I thought I'd just post it here.

I saved some sketches from thesis.. These are just some of them..

I did my thesis on Turandot by Giacomo Puccini.

First, ofcourse.. sketches! Whole semester of SKETCHES! it was tiring..

these arent the first ones.. but when I started to get the idea..:

1. The bamboo piece getting there, and those heads on a stick eventually became lanterns.. but tom said i need to be more SEVERE with them... so...

2. my bamboos (the last one on this set) became bigger.. so i decided to go for large scale paintings to involve the viewers more (unless you are really tall)

3. lanterns sketches! i got started painting after this point.

this interation was too weird for me. i dont know faces looked funny, sizes were weird, so i changed it around..

work in progress for bamboo:

gong piece just sorta came out of while i was watching The Banquet for research of emperial china. Just sorta became my favorite piece! After few hours starting on the gong:

I could only manage to pull off 3.. So I was thinking about how I could make it work as 3 pieces. First of all I had vertical likes and round objects in all 3 to architecturally structure the series.. Also I set the mood by sharing the same reds on all the paintings. I played with the sky to order them chronologically.. (bamboo-late night, gong- sunrise, lantern-morning). Also placing the gong piece in the middle, I was able to pull 2 other pieces together as one series, because its most symmetrical.

I also wanted one color to dominate each piece, no matter how many colors I used (except black... but i did use black gesso though..)

I hope its helpful, (yuri).

There are amazing juniors working on their thesis.. I'm totally gonna be blown away this year. and be ashamed.

-tae