Zainab's Art Adventures

I recently started learning Adobe Photoshop and this was the first piece of digital art that I made on it. This piece is basically the digital equivalent of a collage/ mixed media artwork: all the elements in this composition - the window, wall, plants, etc. - were seperate photographs I gathered (most of them are from stock image sites Unsplash and Pixabay ) and combined together to create this. The concept for this painting came from me thinking about whether - in an alternate universe - nature could exist in its true, unadulterated form, looking at the industrialized, urbanized - basically destroyed - version of the earth where we live from afar. It was one of those weird ideas I often get. Nevertheless, I tried to translate that feeling into an image in this art piece.

I have done a lot of experiments with Urdu typography/ hand-lettering but somehow all my attempts fall short of what I expect myself to create. This was probably my first successful attempt at hand-lettering in Urdu (and yes I understand the irony of that; Urdu being my first language). The concept and execution were both my original ideas, and I'm really happy with how this turned out. :) Any feedback/ critique would be more than welcome. :)

A couple of months ago I attended a two-week summer program at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture  in Karachi. The program was titled Crossover , and was aimed at students aged 15 and above. (My sister Fatima , who also attended these two courses alongside me and my brother , wrote a descriptive piece about the whole experience which you can check out here .) One of the assignments in the second week of the course - which was titled Media Crossings , and covered themes connected to social media, filmmaking and new media/post-internet art among others - was this thing which I am posting here. The task was to think about ourselves and our identities; both online as well as in real life, and then to create an art piece that acts as a portal between the two.  Although I don't think the piece I created does that very well (I think what I did made the contrast more obvious instead of bridging the difference), here's the result anyway. The face ...

Last month, I attended a workshop titled ' The Basics of Photography ', held at ERDC . On the final day of the workshop, participants were supposed to give a presentation of photographs they took over the course of the workshop. We were free to present any of our photography, however, there was one important criteria: the photographs being presented must have some meaning, or tell a story. I loved the idea behind this assignment, and also the fact that we had absolute creative freedom for it. Although it was a bit difficult to come up with a theme for it (this wasn't part of the assignment, but I wanted my pictures to convey one message, so I felt it was necessary to have one), as there was so much I could do, but finally I decided on one theme: contrast. My presentation was titled ' Light & Dark: An exploration of visual and metaphorical contrast '. The idea for this was one that had occurred to me before as well, but I never managed to work on it. The...