Mixed media Collage series

Graphite Drawings

Teapot Series

Danbo drawing

Ice Cream Information Graphic

Magazine process

Artist Biography

Table of contents

4-9

10-13

14-19

20-23

24-34

36-43

44-45

4 Imagine

Burnt out

For Burnt out, it was made on a wood like material. I carved out the piece of land where the girl is laid across on and glued back those pieces where it appears to be clouds. Then I ripped up magazine pages with dark blues and laid them out as unsteady waves. The sky seemed too polished for me and I didn’t want that for this piece so I used a sharp tool to create a series of scratch marks. Then I started painting a figure that had fallen and is slowly fading. There was a hole where the flower is placed and didn’t know what to do with it to make it go away until I saw a bouquet of wilted flowers.

I asked my friend if I could have them and used one of the flowers to cover the hole and flower petals from another flower to look like they are being blown away. Then I decided to make the hair color similar to the color of the flower. I didn’t want to make a facial expression on the figure and so paint-ed a white mask over her face. This piece kind of reminds me of Castle in the Sky and it has been a long time since i have seen that movie. For this piece the flower reflects the life slowly fading away from the fallen fig-ure who is done fighting and is ready to rest easy.

6 Imagine

Escape

This piece was made on a white canvas and I decided to call it Escape. At the bottom of the canvas I started gluing irregular pieces of magazine that I had ripped and contin-ued when it started to look like a mountain range. I didn’t exactly know what I was go-ing to do with the background but I knew that I didn’t want it to be white. So I grabbed a big brush and dipped it in dark red paint and painted diagonally, trying to avoid the mountain range that I already had on the canvas. Next, I did the same thing with black paint to give it a dark feel. I usually try to paint solid colors so that the white canvas doesn’t show through but this time I decided to let it peek through the paint.

Then I used a sharp tool to create scratch marks and it started to look like a strong sharp wind was blowing across the canvas. When I was done I had glued a violet flower and a woman in a mask blowing away from it, slowly disappearing and had flower petals laid out to look like they were blowing in the wind. For this piece the girl was finally able to escape the hardships of life, the flow-er representing life and the wind hardships, which is not able to affect the girl anymore.

8 Imagine

This is a mixed media piece that I decided to call Savior. I used Game informer maga-zine pages and chose pages with cool colors which gave it kind of a dark feel. The rect-angle around the upper body of the figure was the original image without the wings and the bow and arrow. He held some kind of laser gun and I decided to change it into the bow and arrow that you can see is vis-ible right now. I also made it look like he was wearing kind of like trench coat with black charcoal for the outline and colored it in with an oil pastel.

Savior

I didn’t have a plan with what I was going to do with this piece, I just went along with what came to mind at first. The idea from the moon being behind the figure came from the Greek god Artemis because of weapon that the figure was holding. I think that this im-age has a dark, mysteriously medieval kind of feel to it and I love it because I think that in the medieval times is when people were passionate to bring a change about their lives and how they didn’t have advanced technol-ogy to help them survive besides weapons.

10 Imagine

I dont WANT to

This is a drawing of a image I found on Google. I used graphite to sketch out the ob-jects and then went back in with color pencil and used black over a color to make it more of a darker shade of that color. I decided to call it “I don’t WANT to” because even though it has a lot of color, it still has kind of like a gloomy vibe because of the shad-ing. Someone said that the only bright area is shining in through the room and that it kind of shows how the one that owns the room doesn’t want to go out.

I thought that was interesting because they actually described how I used to be. In high school there was a time when I didn’t want to socialize with anyone when I was at home and I always stayed in my room. My brothers even ended calling it my cave and I thought that was funny. One day I though that I was missing out on a lot and told my-self that I should be more active like I used to be when I was in elementary school, and I finally stepped out of my “cave” more often.

Come Back Home

This is a still life image of various objects avail-able in the class room. I used graphite pencils and an eraser to create the various shades. We were to show depth by drawing in the creases and folds of the cloth that the objects were laid down upon. The items that had the most detail were the stat-ue, coffee pots, and the plants. What I did was begin with the outlines of the objects and then go back into the bigger objects to get started on the details. From the critique, my classmates en-joyed the coffee pots because they said it was like a drawing inside of a drawing. They also enjoyed the shading and detail that was worked into the plants. All I did was put on layers of shading to get it to the appropriate dark value.

I called this piece home because I created a sto-ry with the objects available in the image. There is a male and female’s shoe that belongs to the married couple and they are having problems because the husband is gambling and drinking a lot (glass bottle and pool balls). The wife stays home all day always cleaning the house, dream-ing of the time when they first met dancing (ma-raca), when they were happy. So the Come Back Home title is referring to returning back to the time when they were once happy.

12 Imagine

14 Imagine

This is a teapot created with series of lines. Usually when you start a drawing or sketch it is started with the contour/ outline of the object. Well, not with this drawing. This drawing was starting from the inside by creating a series of horizontal lines from left to right starting from the bottom to the top. Then fixing it with vertical lines that would make the features of the teapot more visible. For this drawing we were to use gray values . As you can see, I used dark gray for shad-ows and light gray for highlights.

and stout

In the image to the right is a screen shot of a computer screen that shows the tools that I used to create this image. I used Adobe Illus-trator and the brush tool which can be found on the far left side of the image right next to the layers window. To change the color of the stroke I used the color window, which is by the top left corner of the image with the colors and their values can be seen running horizontally.

I'm a littleteapot short

16 Imagine

This teapot was done the same way as the gray teapot. Only difference is that in this one I only used black to practice with val-ue. In order to create the illusion of a dark shadow, you create a series of closely drawn lines. To create the illusion of highlights the lines should have more space in between them. So the more lines you create, you make a shadow. The less lines would create the highlights as you can see in the image to the right.

my Spout

In the image on the left, is a screen shot of the computer screen that I was working on. It shows that I used Adobe Illustrator and the tools that comes along with it. Another tool that I used is a Bamboo drawing tablet that connects to the computer screen and has a stylus that acts as the mouse. Wherever you move the stylus on the pad , the arrow on the computer screen will follow. The tools that I used from Illustrator was the brush tool which the brush size/stroke can be adjusted in the brushes window that is open on the right corner of the image.

This is my

handle and this is

18 Imagine

For this drawing I decided to use both gray and black to see how different it would appear com-pared to the last two images of teapots. I think this image shows better difference in value that goes from light to dark and even depth. I started with black to build up the shape of the teapot from the inside. Then, went over with different values of gray to refine the shape of the teapot. This version of the teapot actually reminds me of a sticker that is applied into a children’s book. It also reminds me of the children’s book Win-nie the Pooh.

I just shout

In the image to the left is a screen shot of the tools that I used to create this is image. As the others, I used Adobe Illustrator and the brush tool. You can see the color window that I used to change the value by the top left corner of the image. I didn’t start creating art with a comput-er so I was excited to learn how to do it. Since I had experience with drawing, I just had to get used to using the Bamboo drawing tablet, which transfers onto the computer screen what you draw. Only difference is looking at the screen instead of looking down. Just because I had drawing experience, it didn’t mean that my drawings came out perfect the first try. It takes time and practice to get the hang of anything. Which means you can also be capable of creat-ing an image like this. It would only come out different because it was created with your own unique touch.

When I get all steamed up

20 Imagine

This little box person is called Danbo and he is from a Japanese manga. The character became so popular that Amazon decided to use him to promote their boxes for shipping by building this little guy with their own boxes.

I used Adobe Illustrator and the Bamboo drawing tablet to draw this. This was a class assignment where we were to do three drawings with one color running through all three of them. The images were to be mono-chromatic, warm/cool, and complimentary. I forgot about one color running through all three images so I had to go back and re-do the assignment.

Ooh Pretty!

I also thought that if we were to create an image showing warm colors, we were to only use those colors. Which is what I did for this image, I only used red, orange, and yellow colors as well as their different val-ues to create this image. I chose draw this because it was adorable and the box person and the flower stood out to me and I wanted to do the same thing, but it didn’t happen. I put too much detail in the background so the focal point changed towards the background.

Before

22 Imagine

This is the image from before, I changed the colors so that the flower and Danbo could stand out from the background. The color that I choses to run through the other two images is the color Danbo is since he is in all three images. The other two images were different from the original ones because I wanted to try different images. I only kept this one to show a before and after image.

I still kept the bubbly detail in the back-ground so that the grass wouldn’t be the only detailed part of the image. It is also the only things that I changed from the original image, which is Danbo being surrounded by green leaves. The lines on Danbo were added so that the shadows on him would ap-pear like texture to fit with the background as well. The focus would also move away from the flower and Danbo if I didn’t add some texture.

After

Danbo

25 Imagine

My topic for the info graphic was going to be on ice cream. I still wasn’t sure where I was going to go with it yet so I just start-ed with a bowl of ice cream that had three different flavors. My image was created in Adobe Illustrator and it came out very re-alistic because I would use the magnifying tool to zoom in so I can get as much de-tail as I can possibly get. It took a long time and didn’t even realize how much time has passed by because I would be so focused in creating the shapes for the detail on the ice cream.

Each layer had a lot of paths so you can get confused on which path to click on if you want to adjust the placement of it. I of-ten used the white arrow and clicked on the shape that I wanted to move so I can find which layer it is in and where I should drag it to so that it won’t be hidden by the other paths.

Hungry Yet?

26 Imagine

I created an info-graphic based on ice cream so I wanted to make it appear fun info with bright colors because ice cream comes in many colors as well as flavors. Usually you would find ice cream at theme parks like six flags pr anywhere as a neighbor hood ice cream truck. I thought that circuses are fun and colorful and I was going to go with that theme by creating the banner and the font of the title.

A diamond shape was also used for harle-quins and clown costumes so I tried to use that pattern, but it seemed like it would be too much if I added more diamonds. The goal was to focus on the topic of the info graphic and adding so much designs onto the background would take that away. So for the final image of the info graphic I rearranged the information and a few images so that the first thing that a viewer won’t have to do is read a bunch of information.

How about now?

28 Imagine

The difference between this info graphic and the one before is the placing of the in-formation and the diamond disappeared. The diamond idea was not working out as were the banners. I only kept one banner for the title because it is one of the important parts of the info graphic.

The info graphic has information on the top five countries that consume the most ice cream with the United States coming in first place. I also provides information on the most consumed flavors, as well as wacky flavors for those who dare to try.

The melted ice cream was brought down from the right top corner to the area shaded in orange so that it can look like it is on the ground. By doing that the image was able to bring depth into the info graphic with the map placed a little distance in front of the fallen ice cream cone.

I see no difference

30 Imagine

I have decided to play with the color scheme of the info graphic to explore other possible colors that would work with my design. I am not a huge fan of the color pink because I feel like it is a very feminine color. It makes things cute, but I still prefer to only use it when it is appropriate. I this case, it was one of the colors that I thought looked best for the info graphic.

The pie chart was blown up a bit bigger than the ice cream bowl and moved to-wards the top underneath the banner. This is so that the first thing viewers don’t have to do is read a bunch of information right away. The four ice cream at the bottom have little flags of the location where they are being produced, although the tomato ice cream is the only one that does not have a flag. I couldn’t find an exact location of where the tomato flavored ice cream was first created so I just didn’t put a flag on it.

I changed the color boxes for the informa-tion into a light blue because I thought it was a good combination. I didn’t realize it at the time, bit looking back to it, it reminds me of cotton candy. So to me, this version of the info graphic has a little more of a circus feel.

cotton candy

32 Imagine

This is another color scheme experiment with the color green. I also changed the color of two of the flags that are placed on the chocolate map to them toned down.

I was trying to think of other color combi-nations that could possibly be used to repre-sent ice cream. I thought of using a rainbow theme but then it would be too much focus on the design. The only colors that I thought could work were soft bright colors.

The little strawberries that I have running through these pages are from the bowl of ice cream. I used Photoshop to crop out the strawberry and just made two replicas of them. Then I adjusted the angles of them so that they could appear that they are on the floor.

Spring

35 Imagine

Ice Cream Map

I started out with just the fallen ice cream and then put another image with the map of the world on it and just traced the outline first. I added any color so that I would know where it is and traced over the map again to distinguish the smaller parts like islands. Once I had the map done I made a melted pool around it that leads back to the fallen ice cream. I even made cherries for the top five locations that consume the most ice cream. I was constantly using the zoom in tool that I didn’t realize how tiny they would appear until I put it on the info graphic so I used flags to help distinguish the locations even more.

I continued experimenting with other colors to have a few versions of the info graphic. I thought that the original one is the strongest, visually but I also think the pink info graphic could also work.

I n D e s i g n program

37 Imagine

Creating Process

This is a screen shot of the first page with the image called Burnt out When creating a magazine you use Adobe InDesign. There is the headline, by line, and copy that is needed on every page spread. The by line is only necessary when the magazine in-cludes articles from other people. Since this magazine only includes my won art work the n I just need my name on the cover of the magazine. My professor recommended that I zoom into the girl sprawled across the rock to show close up detail. Then put the full image on the left page next to the text. I also stretched the black rectangle across to fill the whole page and I made a few marks that look like scratch marks to look more closely connected to the painting. The color of the text was also changed so that the title of the painting could stand out from the rest of the text.

Another important window used was the layers window to organize different parts of the pages for each spread. There are three layers, the color boxes, type, and images. This way it is easier to locate things to make changes and place text on top of images.

This is the pages window that diplays all the pages made for the magazine. When satrting out in creating the magazine, we were to insert the number of pages that are divisible by four in order for it to come out right. While creating the magazine you sometimes need to move pages around to put similar pages one after the other and it will create article sections. This is one of the most impotant windows that needs to be open while working on a magazine.

38 Imagine

I had the teapots laid out this way at first, cluttered in one page spread. Then I was ad-vised to give each teapot their own spread so that when the pages get flipped the viewer can just see the differences. Then I flipped the images so that the spout wouldn’t be close to the fold of the book since it is one of the important parts of the teapot. That is when I decided to get rid of one of the tea-pots.

The color box that is behind the teapots was changed because the blue shade was a dark value, which didn’t show the detail of the line marks on the teapots so well. Espe-cially the gray teapot, it looks very washed out with it placed on a sort of dark valued background. That is why I changed the color boxes for each teapot into a bright aqua color.

For each spread we were to have at least 2-3 different types of font styles. I was really satisfied to find a font style that suits every piece of artwork. For example, the font for the title of this page looks like a brush stroke which I thought suited the teapots the most. The size for the text needed to be ten point, but the title could be as big as we wanted it to be.

ImagesThis was created with 100 lines but I decided to delete it because it was just a practice drawing and everything I had to say was already said in the pages for the other teapots.

When placing an image on a page, it gets linked so that whenever you open the document the image doesn’t disappear. This window helps you make sure if there are any missing links.

40 Imagine

Color and placing

The bookshelves of the drawing was placed on the fold and when one looks at the im-age the eyes get drawn towards the book-shelf, making it the focal point. That is why I moved the text to the left side of the spreads so that the image can be moved over to the right. That way the focal point does not land right on top of the fold of the spreads.

When placing the images on the spreads we have to makes sure when printed, it does not come out pixelated. You can click to view images in high quality and then change it back to normal, but that is not the only way to check if the image will come out fine. It is recommended to print the spreads a few times because the color on the computer screen may appear bright enough to read on a dark color box, but once printed the text would appear a bit darker than originally thought. This is to make sure the magazine can be readable to viewers.

This is the eye dropper tool that makes it easier to use the same value of color you want to use from previous pages or straight from the images itself.

This is the color window that is used to change the color of text, boxes, and lines. The swatches tab has the general colors like red, blue, green, yellow and no values. Another tool that could be used is the eye-dropper tool. It makes things a lot easier if you want to use the same value you used on one page on other pages.

42 Imagine

Ice cream

There was very little change that I did on this page. I just added a color box underneath the text description of the piece. While I was working on this page, it felt like something was missing be-cause it didn’t look quite finished to me. This is when I added the color box and changed the font style for the tittle of the page. Even changing the color of the text so that it can be more readable on top of a dark background.

A friend told what program she used to cut out pieces of her artwork to place them on other parts of the page without it looking like she was over using the original image. I never really used Photoshop before so it took me a few minutes to figure out which tool to use to select the straw-berry in the image and cut it out to use as a deco-rative piece on the pages about ice cream.

This the shape tool that can be used to create the color boxes to put underneath text when placing text on top of images or using it as part of decoration.

This is the text tool used to create text anywhere you want.

45 Imagine

My name is Citlali Torres and I am a Studio Art major at SXU. I am a freshman and I graduated from Curie High school.

Before High school, I have never had any art classes, so all I did was just draw. Then in High school I picked up painting and started adding mixed media to my pieces. I participated in a program called Gallery 37 found on Randolph and Wabash during my junior and senior year of high school. It is an art program with different classes, which I took honors mixed media and AP sculptor. For the winter and spring shows held we get to choose at least 1-2 of our pieces that we have worked on.

At SXU I received a scholarship for 4 years and an art scholarship that is renewable each year. This year I am receiving 5,000 from the Art scholarship and I am very thankful for it. I am also glad I get even more oppor-tunities to expand my media through SXU. So far I have learned how to use programs to create art with in Graphic design. I also work on campus as a ceramics assistant and I am learning how to use some wood tools to assist other students while the professor is teaching another class.

Artist Biography

- Citlali Torres

ConsumedNo matter how hard I try, You consume my thoughts.

No matter what I try,I keep feeling these little knots.

I’d hate to think I’ve become obsessed.I don’t want to be an idiotwho falls in love so fast.

Though I’m grateful this came to be,I hope you experience the same things as

me.