APD - Play and Body with neon

Body was really difficult as a theme this week because figuring out a way to disrupt the interpretation of the body as subject matter was really complicated to me. My favourite subject matter in my art is people and bodies, so I was trying to change the way I thought of the body in this art

I started with creating line drawings of faces with piercings because how people will suffer or endure pain for their favourite aesthetic is fascinating. Some people in the alternative, punk and goth communities have extreme amounts of piercings in their faces and bodies, so I started drawing that. From this, I thought about what if I drew connecting points between the piercings of 2 faces. This led into my experiment earlier with creating animated lineart 

Recently, I have been rewatching Avatar the Last Airbender and the season 2 finale episode, The Guru/ Crossroads of Destiny explores an ancient theory of energy called chakras. I took the experiments that I've done so far, and using Adobe After Effects, translated this idea of paths channeling light or energy through them

This was achieved using the Pen Tool and Trim Paths to make it look like the paths of light were looping back and forth along the lineart. I duplicated layers and added an Offset and also stylised with a Glow effect.

Biggest learning opportunity that came out of this workshop was sticking to my goal of creating animated linework in After Effects to achieve the specific look that I wanted. The failed experiments, while they look good, expanded the linework as though in a bubble of colour from a single point, whereas my successful final object shows the lineart specifically filling with colour on specific paths.