Identities project

As I only started my blog about halfway through the identities project I realise that there may have been key areas that I have missed. This post will fill in any gaps from that project.
After working with drawings from my head I decided to move to people who exist and are recognisable. The thing which made me realise I could more fully explore identities if I worked with famous recognisable faces was this list.http://www.buzzfeed.com/paulaersly/glorious-illustrations-of-pop-cultures-favorite-baldies. The list features only the top of the head of 15 bald pop culture icons as drawn by the artist Mr. Peruca (website:http://www.mrperuca.com/). I liked how each character was easily recognisable despite only seeing one part of them and wanted to do something similar with my work. I then thought of a similar poster I'd seen that shows musicians iconic hairstyles. I originally

used the hairstyles from this poster to draw the same head but with the hair of iconic musicians to show how much identity can be shown through hair. I then thought that if identity can be shown through hair so easily can it be shown without it. This is how my bald musician project started.






















I also want to talk about a systematic way to make a range of identities. I came up with 9 sections to make a face: head shape, mouth, eyes, nose, hair, ears, eyebrows, wrinkles and skin oddities. For each of these features I came up with 10 different versions. These features can be mixed and matched to create a variety of different identifiable faces. I also created a system where you could take someones phone number and assign each digit to a feature to create another completely separate identity for that person. This series of work reminds me of a kind

of analog identikit as you could combine certain versions of each feature to try and create an actual person. Here is a good website to experiment with identikit that I've looked at http://flashface.ctapt.de/.
This series of work was useful but challenging because coming up with 10 versions of each feature was difficult and meant I had to come up with ways of drawing some features that I'm not used to or have never done before. This would hopefully allow me to be able to draw more of a range of faces and styles in the future.








 I found a video that I thought was useful and could be seen to do with identities. The Paper Kites, Young video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF8PSGl-aIY) is made of over 4000 photos and over 350 faces. Despite these 350 separate identities most of them get lost in the speed of the photos changing or appear to create new identities as your brain tries to keep up with the change of photos and merges the photos together.