Nicolle Rezwin- Identity Final Critique

The name of my piece is called It is Hard to Have Two Religions. This piece is by me, Nicolle Rezwin and I have been working on this piece from October 17-November 4 2013. I used Adobe Illustrator in designing my piece.

As mentioned above I used Adobe Illustrator to create my piece. In Adobe Illustrator, I mainly used the pen tool, image trace, live paint, and the gradient tool. The main subject in this piece is the Catholic and Jewish religion and how they differ. The secondary subject is the differences between my mother and father. This piece is an integrative piece because it compares the two religions, there is strong variation and comparison of scale, and close attention to cropping is used.

This piece has a lot to do with my identity. Growing up, I was fortunate to celebrate two religions, the Catholic and Jewish faith. My Mother is catholic and my father is Jewish. In my piece, I have broken down my experiences. Without the experience of celebrating both of these religions, my life would be different and I would have a different identity. With both religions in to four compositions on 11 by 17 inch paper. In my fist piece, I compared having to celebrate different traditions such as decorating the Christmas tree and eating Hanukkah chocolate gelt. In my second piece, I have compared the two beliefs that my mother and father follow. These are the catholic priest and the Jewish rabbi. The next piece that I composed was of the different food our family eats on major holidays. For Christmas and Easter our family eats ham for mother, and for holidays such as Hanukkah, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah our family eats corned beef for my father. In the last piece, I used the pen tool and drew an image of me. In the background, I have the colors purple to represent the catholic religion and blue to represent the Jewish one, I am wearing a dark blue shirt because that is what you get when you mix purple and blue together. It is also symbolic because those two religions are a part of me. I am not one or the other. In this piece, I compared my piece to work of former students in other blogs past and present. I really liked the illustration aspect to their pieces and I wanted to bring that in to my own.  The events and ideas that shaped my approach are from past such as how I grew up.

The purpose of this piece is to show that two religions can be hard to celebrate. Celebrating two religions is not a bad thing and if not makes one more acceptable and gives a different perspective of other people’s religion and beliefs. I want my audience to view having different religions as a good thing.

Overall, I thought my project was successful. The strengths are the deeper meanings it has and the illustration. The weaknesses are my first couple of drafts because I felt like I could develop them more.