Kathryn Rickards

feeling peachy 🍑

self-portrait; colored pencil and felt-tip pen

WIP – background progress on a painting i started last year and recently came back to. acrylic on canvas.

[Image Description 1: A painting of myself, a woman with light skin, in tones of yellow and peach, with purple shadows, sitting cross-legged with my hands resting on my knees. I wear a dark blue, cropped sleeveless top and dark blue pants. My hair is short and my head is tilted slightly upwards to the left with a neutral expression. The background is shades of teal. There are white structures resembling cells or flower petals above and overlapping my forearm. /end ID 1]

[ID 2: The same painting, with additional white clusters in the right half of the painting’s background. Some of the white cells overlap my neck. There are two larger semicircular structures in the upper right, filled with cells that have dark pink nuclei. There are similar shapes outlined in the upper middle and lower left. /end ID 2]

back with more hands... experimenting with turning some of my quicker sketches into finished pieces, too. acrylics on 8x10” canvas.

please click to see it in nice quality 🙏

[ID: An acrylic painting on a vertical canvas of a right hand and wrist, done entirely in tones of pink. The hand fills most of the image and is slightly off-center to the left. The thumb and index fingers point up, and the other three fingers curl inwards towards the palm.

SLICE IV-VI | Nov 2017 | Acrylic on Duralar

INCARNATE I, II, IV, and V - work from intermediate painting, and overall a satisfying spring semester. acrylic and crayon on canvas.

details under the cut

This was my final project for basic sculpture from November/ December - the prompt was “banner,” but I think it sort of became its own thing in the end

The frame is made out of steel pencil rod (welded using both the oxyacetylene torch and the MIG welder), and it’s 28″x28″x60″

The fabric panel base is polyester and the attached pieces are mostly cotton, some synthetic. I used a combo of machine and hand stitching based on what was available at the time. The back/4th panel is entirely painted with acrylic paints. The black details on the front panel are paint marker

I did most of the sewing for this over Thanksgiving break (and quite a bit of it at the train station and on the actual train to and from Richmond) and I didn’t think I would ever get it done. I finished attaching the last panel to the steel frame about 7 minutes before the critique started, I think

4th drawing project - interior space. It kind of turned into a self-portrait, because this was around October/November when the semester went from hard to ridiculous and I never got fall reading days to give me a breather. So instead of just drawing the space itself, I was thinking about how I had been inhabiting my dorm/apartment. I’d been pulling a lot of all nighters, getting into really weird sleep patterns, and barely felt like I was living in my own room

CAPTION:

(Panel 1) I haven’t slept in my own bed in over a week. (Panel 2) Early in the morning, (Panel 3) I get home from the studio, (Panel 4) nap on the sofa until my roommate wakes up, (Panel 5) and we have breakfast.

My “personal project” from photography - I had to create the prompt and then make 6 images that fit it. I decided to work with architectural abstraction, because I thought it would be interesting given the architecture in the city

I actually took like 250 photos for this project (many were different exposures or framings of the same shot), but these are the 6 I liked best

When I have access to them again (I left them at school) I might also post some of my photograms and cyanotypes I did this semester in photo! We mostly worked digitally, but we experimented with those processes and it was fun

Selections from my photography projects this semester. We had 6 technical assignments (bracketing; depth of field; motion; light; pov, context, visual structure; and portraits), so these 16 photos are barely representative of what I did, but they’re some of my favorites

I can’t post anything from the portrait assignment because I don’t have permission from the people involved - a lot of them were strangers

Second drawing project - self portrait. Originally done in September 2016, went back to it in December. Colored pencil on pink-tinted paper, 18x24″ (roughly?)

Fun fact about this project: I bought a neon pink colored pencil just to do the jacket for this project and afterwards, it was about 2.5″ long

First sculpture project from September - life-size wood replicas of real objects

These are made of a bunch of different kinds of wood (pine plywood, lauan plywood, pine 2x4s, MDF, balsa, poplar dowel) because I mostly used what I could find in the woodshop scrap and bought wood when I needed to

The paint is water-based latex interior house paint

Fun facts about this project:

The teapot handle actually swivels (my greatest achievement)

I did almost everything with a drill press, a jigsaw, and various sanders

I still have a scar on my finger from where I hurt it with a wood chisel trying to carve that flashlight into the proper shape

Here’s my first piece from observational drawing from August/September - a portrait of my friend/roommate. Graphite on blue-tinted paper, roughly 14x19″