Plaster Portrait Project: Che Guevara

          For this project, I chose to form a plaster portrait of Che Guevara, the former Argentinian-Marxist revolutionary. I worked with Noah and we slathered plaster on a wooden board in order to layer on his cheekbones, nose, chin, and higher areas of his face. We brainstormed many different pop culture figures that would stand out and make a recognizable figure in the plaster.
         Although me and Noah were both thinking about keeping the plaster purely white, Mr. Sands advised us to add color to the plaster. You can see us testing colors out on slabs of wet plaster on cardboard in the first picture. We used acrylic paint to color at first, but it ended up making the plaster brittle and easily cracked. Instead, we used food coloring and made it mono-chromatic with only red, black, and white. This was a risk that ended up making the project more interesting.

 The finished product was very low-depth and shallow but I ended up liking it. The stencil-look and shadows looked just how I imagined and the red background was interesting. I ended up liking plaster a lot.