Drawing & Sketches

“This section presents a range of drawing-based explorations where I translated emotion, culture, and identity into visual narratives. Through various mediums—charcoal, pencil, pastel, and ink—I explored both observational and imaginative approaches to drawing.”

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Explorations in Form, Story, and Medium

From figure studies to narrative illustrations, this collection brings together drawings that span academic exercises and expressive personal works. Using pencil, charcoal, colored pencil, and mixed media, I investigate both the technical and conceptual possibilities of drawing as a primary tool for thinking, seeing, and creating.

  • Quick studies exploring proportion, movement, and anatomy through repeated figure drawing sessions.

  • Explorations of emotional tone and dynamic motion using color, shape, and line in non-traditional media.

  • Mixed-media collages constructing fragmented narratives from vintage imagery, found print, and surreal juxtapositions.

  • Impression-based drawing using unconventional materials like charcoal dust, body contact, and gestural smudging.

  • Character concept drawings built from observing mundane gestures and recurring postures in everyday life.

  • Sketches and color work on found or textured surfaces exploring visual contrast and material unpredictability.

  • Reinterpretations of historical masterworks to understand composition, lighting, and visual narrative.

  • A reinterpretation of The Tale of Simcheong, visualizing emotional fragmentation and cultural symbolism through layered portraits. This work explores how traditional stories can reflect modern internal conflict.

Studies of Form and Gesture

This series captures the expressive dynamism of the human figure through gesture drawing. Each page explores movement, posture, and anatomy, emphasizing rhythm over precision. These quick studies—ranging from delicate lines to bold marks—reveal how the body communicates without words.

Rather than rendering perfect proportions, the goal is to investigate weight distribution, tension, and spatial flow. The varying levels of contour, tone, and exaggeration highlight the emotional and physical range of the human form, laying the foundation for later figurative and conceptual work.

Series

Studies on the Human Form

Medium & Term

Charcoal & Conté on Paper, Winter 2025

Figure in the Studio

  • This drawing captures the back view of a life-sized figure model inside a studio. By choosing an unusual perspective and cropping, I focused on the stretch and twist of the spine and shoulder. The background easels hint at the artist’s environment, adding narrative to the static pose.

  • Layered pencil and pastel strokes build the volume of the body, while color blending techniques were used to capture both the artificial studio lighting and the natural light beyond the window. Texture was emphasized using varied pressure and cross-hatching.

Self-Portrait Without a Face

  • This pastel drawing explores the idea of self-representation without relying on facial features. Instead, gesture, body angle, and color intensity express emotional presence. The upturned hand and tilted posture invite viewers to interpret identity through body language rather than facial expression.

  • Working with soft pastels on toned paper, I layered short directional strokes to emphasize movement and energy. The patterned yellow background contrasts with the cool tones of the clothing, helping to create depth and a sense of internal vs. external space.

Expressive Color Studies

These pastel studies reinterpret the human figure through bold color, simplified forms, and energetic mark-making. Rather than focusing on realistic detail, the goal was to explore the emotional quality of posture, movement, and spatial tension using layered strokes and limited palettes.

Visual Collage Stories

Chained Persona

A fragmented figure made of denim, watches, and chains explores how branding and trends shape identity. Headless and mechanical, the body suggests a loss of individuality beneath consumer ideals, questioning whether material expression frees or confines us.

Office Oddity

A humorous yet unsettling collage depicting office life and societal roles. Disembodied faces, oversized hands, and mismatched objects highlight the absurdity of productivity and the surreal repetition of daily routine.

Figure Variations on Collaged Ground

  • A visual exploration of bodily form and movement through gestural figure drawings. Each pose investigates proportion, energy, and negative space, emphasizing intuitive mark-making over anatomical precision.

  • Figures were painted in black ink over a hand-built collage background made from repurposed paper and printed text. The layered surface adds texture, history, and abstraction to the figures.

  • The contrast between fluid, expressive figures and the bold, geometric collage elements enhances visual rhythm. The use of repetition highlights small shifts in gesture and emotional nuance.

  • Balancing clarity of form with abstraction was a key challenge. The piece experiments with how context—both compositional and material—can influence the viewer’s perception of the body.

This collage series combines vintage imagery, media fragments, and surreal juxtapositions to explore identity, memory, and material culture.

Some works depict social critique through disjointed narratives, while others investigate movement, gesture, and formal rhythm through abstracted bodies and layered compositions.

Each piece invites viewers to interpret and connect the elements in their own way.

Receive

This energetic collage features consumer icons, playful footwear, and nostalgic Americana. Central to the piece is the word “receive,” raising questions about passive consumption, cultural messages, and the way media infiltrates everyday life.

Echoes of the Past

Interweaving portraits of people and horses, this piece evokes themes of rural life, heritage, and generational memory. The blending of documentary photos with disjointed figures reflects the tension between tradition and modernity.

Ghost Drawing

Material as Contrast

This drawing investigates contrast through materiality and process, rather than value. Using only gesso and graphite on large-scale paper, the figure emerges subtly from the white surface through built-up texture and layering.

Inspired by the idea of “white-on-white,” the work challenges the eye to perceive form through surface shifts, directional marks, and physical depth. The ghostlike presence of the body—both visible and hidden—reflects on the boundaries of visibility and perception, encouraging slow looking and tactile awareness.

Daily Habits:
A Character Study

Exploring Identity, Habit, and Absurdity through a Fabricated Figure

This series follows the life of a soft sculpture character—constructed from clothing, props, and fabric—posed in ordinary, domestic environments. Through photography, drawing, and painting, the figure enacts scenes of mundane rituals: lying in bed, lounging, drinking coffee, scrolling through a phone.

Stripped of facial identity but clothed in familiar textures, the character invites questions about routine, embodiment, and emotional distance in contemporary life.

The repetition of striped clothing and exaggerated proportions emphasizes rhythm, pattern, and theatricality. Each visual interpretation—whether in graphite or saturated color—adds a new emotional lens to the same fabricated figure, transforming a static object into a vehicle of narrative and empathy.

  • Photography (Installation Documentation)

    This staged photograph captures a soft sculpture figure reclining in a bedroom setting. The figure is made of fabric and clothing, with a pink face covering and exaggerated limbs, evoking both humor and anonymity. The scene mirrors contemporary moments of digital escapism and self-isolation, blurring the line between rest and detachment.

  • Shadow, Space, and Stillness

    This subset focuses on observational pencil drawings paired with photographs of a fabricated character posed in real domestic settings.

    The project investigates how tone, light, and shadow shape the atmosphere and emotional weight of a figure with no face.

    Each composition is carefully framed to emphasize solitude, rhythm, and the relationship between body and space. Through tonal variation and directional light, the character’s presence feels simultaneously artificial and intimate—grounded in everyday life, yet hauntingly distant.

  • Graphite Drawing (Based on Installation)

    This graphite drawing reinterprets the Lazy Sunday setup through detailed tonal rendering. The play of light through window blinds creates a structured, cinematic mood. The stripes of the clothing echo the shadows, enhancing depth and rhythm. This piece explores stillness, routine, and the architecture of solitude.

  • Mixed Media (Acrylic & Colored Pencil)

    A vibrant, surreal take on the same character, this piece transforms the soft figure into a luxurious icon of leisure. The water and floatation ring suggest escape, while the lipstick and coffee cup hint at performative relaxation. The piece uses bold color and stylization to comment on self-care and artificial identity.

Unconventional
Surface Experiments

This series explores the commodification and dehumanization of the human body within contemporary society. Through a sequence of sketches and a final painting, the work critiques how individuals are fragmented, packaged, and priced—reduced to parts on a production line. The conveyor belt motif becomes a metaphor for systemic erasure of individuality, where humans are no longer seen as whole beings, but as standardized, consumable objects.

Across each composition, limbs and features are intentionally incomplete or isolated, wrapped in plastic or rendered lifeless. The repetition and mechanical layout reinforce the cold detachment of mass production, urging viewers to question the role of identity, autonomy, and value in a consumer-driven world. Visually, the works combine drawing, colored pencil, and acrylic to heighten the tension between the organic body and synthetic surface.

Body as Commodity

  • 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm)

    Large-scale format emphasizes the overwhelming nature of mass production, allowing each fragmented body part to dominate the viewer’s field of vision and mirror the endless repetition of factory lines.

  • Acrylic paint, colored pencil, and graphite on Bristol paper

    The use of mixed media contrasts the matte flatness of industrial greys with the vibrant texture of red pencil renderings. Glossy plastic effects and sharp outlines mimic commercial packaging and label graphics.

  • “Mass Production of Humanity”

    This final piece encapsulates the themes of the Manufactured Selves series. Human body parts are packaged, priced, and displayed on conveyor belts like products in a dystopian marketplace. The arrangement and color choices reflect the tension between personhood and commodification, challenging the viewer to confront what is lost when identity is processed, priced, and sold.

  • Repetition, Diagonal Composition, and Visual Irony

    The repeated diagonal belts structure the visual flow like an assembly line, creating a rhythmic and mechanical sense of movement. Price tags and SALE signs add an ironic twist, echoing advertisement language while undercutting its meaning. The viewer is invited to reflect not only on what is sold, but on who is buying—and at what cost.

Reassembled Selves: Fragments of Resistance

  • Tension in Bloom

    Tension in Bloom

    • Materials: Colored pencil, ink pen, rubber bands

    • Size: 9” x 12”

    • A bound figure glows against a vibrant, energetic background. The body’s distortion and the real rubber bands emphasize restraint and inner resistance within a chaotic environment.

  • Becoming Tree

    • Materials: Oil pastel, colored pencil

    • Size: 9” x 12”

    • A figure merges with a tree, arms raised like branches. This transformation explores themes of rootedness, identity, and the surrender of human form to the organic.

  • Blooming Mind

    • Materials: Colored pencil, graphite

    • Size: 9” x 12”

    • A figure with a lotus blooming from its head meditates atop lily pads. The exaggerated fusion of human and flower suggests enlightenment, spiritual growth, and the blending of body and nature.

  • Detached Flow

    • Materials: Graphite, soft pastel

    • Size: 14” x 17”

    • A segmented figure floats mid-air, its limbs ballooning out into undefined forms. This exaggerated disconnection hints at fragmentation, alienation, and transformation in progress.

  • Melting Self

    • Materials: Colored pencil

    • Size: 14” x 17”

    • The figure appears to dissolve into a puddle of its own form. A visual metaphor for emotional exhaustion, burnout, or identity loss in the comfort of familiarity.

Through the Eyes of a Master

What does it mean to become both subject and observer?

This project began as a formal analysis of a Neoclassical portrait—but evolved into a personal investigation of authorship, gaze, and embodied history. By stepping into the role of the painted figure, I engaged not only with composition and light, but with how women have been staged and idealized across time.

Rather than merely replicating an image, I experienced it—posing, studying, and ultimately redrawing it through my own lens. The work reflects a layered process of reflection, where imitation became interpretation, and observation became authorship.

  • Original Painting by Angelika Kauffmann

    This Neoclassical portrait, Vestal Virgin (1781), became the foundation of this study. Kauffmann’s depiction of feminine purity and quiet strength through soft lighting and classical gesture offered a rich subject to reinterpret. Observing the composition and symbolism served as the first step in understanding her visual language.

  • Pose, Styling, and Photography by HaYoun Jun

    I recreated the image using modern materials—curtains, a vintage dress, and a desk lamp—to mirror the original’s light, texture, and mood. Posing as the subject allowed me to physically embody the energy and grace of the sitter, while interpreting the composition through a personal lens.

  • Oil Pastel & Pencil on Paper

    The final drawing is not a replica but a re-translation. I focused on the flow of fabric, the stillness of the pose, and the emotional resonance of the original while experimenting with texture and color. The result is a drawing that feels historically rooted but subjectively reimagined—bridging classical observation with contemporary voice.

Fragmented Self

Reimagining Folklore

– A Reimagining of Sacrifice –

A reinterpretation of the Korean folktale Simcheongjeon through a contemporary feminist lens.

This work explores the tension between inherited virtue and individual agency by visually layering Korean folk motifs with symbolic compositions.

Mixed media on paper
(oil pastel, acrylic, gesso)

Inspired by minhwa & East Asian mythology

  • This piece was originally inspired by the question:

    “Is sacrifice still a virtue when it’s expected?”

    While researching Simcheongjeon, I became interested in how traditional stories often celebrate selflessness in women without questioning its cost.

    Rather than retelling the folktale literally, I used symbolism to represent inner conflict and personal strength. The net represents both restriction and transformation—a space between drowning and rebirth.

    This drawing is a personal response to cultural expectations I’ve encountered as a Korean woman, and a reflection on how stories shape identity.

  • A reinterpretation of Simcheongjeon that challenges blind filial piety and sacrifice, questioning its relevance and virtue in contemporary society.

  • Includes Korean folk elements such as waves, lotus flowers, and mythical creatures, intentionally layered to evoke ambiguity and tension.

  • Mixed media (oil pastels & acrylic) with gesso-applied net for texture. Originated from a pencil concept sketch, then evolved into a final work with critical narrative depth.

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