The goal of this project was to make a piece of art that could sell, and to have a portion of the project be taken from another artist. I decided to make a piece of art that was easily recognizable but with a twist, and drew motivation by using subjects I personally liked.
After watching the documentary on street art in class, I picked up that using easily recognizable images such as Space Invaders, celebrities, and commercial objects was a successful method. Also, I drew on the iconic style of the artist whose art I took (polka dots) and incorporated them into my piece.
First I read up on what pop art was on the Wikipedia page for it, where I was reminded of the avant-garde feminist pop art artist Kusama Yayoi, who influenced Andy Warhol. I remembered seeing her on TV once and thinking she was interesting, and being drawn to her artwork's repetitive use of polka dots and bright colors.
I didn't know right away what I was going to do with the picture, but I cropped the mushrooms.
Later that day, I was in my friend's room and we all started playing the original Super Mario Bros. game on an NES emulator. As I was playing, the mushrooms reminded me of the Ideate project, and this was where I came up with my idea. I decided on incorporating Kusama's mushrooms into an easily recognizable scene of Super Mario Bros., which would check off one of my goals of having something easily recognizable.
A challenge I faced with this was making the Kusama mushrooms and the Super Mario scene blend together. To mix them in, I decided to alter it to Super Yayoi, where the character looks like Kusama and her signature polka dots are seen all over. For the final touch, for the numbers used at the top of the piece I decided to use numbers pertaining to Kusama.
After I added some more details I moved onto resizing the mushrooms and deciding their placement. To do this, I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop, because based on my last project I knew that I couldn't copy paste images in my version of SAI. After I added the mushrooms to my image, I added angry eyes to one of them to make it look kind of like a Goomba (Mario's enemies).
Lastly, I added the text at the top of the screen displaying information. The numbers have to do with her birthdate and age. I gave the remaining time a value of infinity to represent how she will live forever through her creations.
Although I had a lot of fun with this project, I'm not as happy as I could be with the final product in terms of the overarching goal of making something that would sell. There's a lot of things I feel like I could have done. One is to have made everything I made with pixel art to make it look even more like the retro Super Mario Bros. game. However, that may have made it harder for the stolen artwork blend in, and could have taken a long time. Even if I hadn't done it with pixel art, there are still some parts of this that look sloppy (the lettering at the top, the uneven bricks at the bottom).
My intent of making it easily recognizable though, I think was achieved, as my friends who saw me working on it quickly identified it and even praised me on how similar the green pipe looked. However, I don't think it would sell due to the sloppiness of my artwork and also due to Kusama Yayoi not being that easily recognizable. It just looks like a polka dot version of Super Mario.
Now looking back on it I think the project could have achieved its intention better if I had taken artwork from Super Mario Bros. and done something solely based off of that due to its high recognizability. I included Kusama's artwork because I personally really liked it but I don't think my idea of how to incorporate it, no matter how well it was done technically, would have sold. I learned that going off of my first idea isn't always the best, and I should take a little more time to think it over before committing to a project. Art that you enjoy making or that you enjoy the meaning of doesn't guarantee that it will sell.
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