Having already completed the final piece of work for my Visual Arts project, I will now try to provide a complex evaluation of the workflow during its creation. The first was the investigation phase, which enabled us to find out what a mask is and how the different types of masks throughout various cultures have been developed. All of the prepared presentations were certainly very coherent and featured many interesting facts, which gave me a great deal of inspiration on how my mask could look. The presentations were divided into European, African and Asian cultural regions, each presenting the characteristic features of the regions' maskmaking process. Next, we have prepared our first design of a mask, a sketch based on the Kashubian motives and culture. It was a phase that would tell us how to use an inspiration later on during the project. In my opinion it was a very valuable lesson, since we have had our first attempt at designing a mask, which would help us during the real design phase. Then, we have made a try at using glue in order to make the basis of the mask, a condensed mass of paper on a normal sheet of paper. This would show us how to do it before we would create the mask on a real baloon. It was indeed a very good idea to do this beforehand, so that the final quality of our projects would be improved. Now we were ready to begin the project properly, so we have commenced that by producing three designs of the masks we were to make, inspired by various cultures. It was also an extremely important phase, since it enabled us to narrow down the single design that would serve as the motif for the mask and start doing the project itself with a clear idea of what we were going to do.
In the creation phase, we glued many layers of paper to a blown baloon, in order to obtain a sturdy form that would serve as a backbone of the mask and then detached the ready form from the baloon. Now, I was able to decorate the mask in my chosen way. I have decorated it using African motives and with the use of pastel crayons, in order to obtain the scratchy image that African works are often characterised by.
In my opinion, the whole project was remarkably interesting and original. It did not require any special manual skills in order to achieve the results that one wanted to produce. I have certainly developed much during the creation of this project, mainly because of the knowledge of basic mask types and ways of creating them that I have gained.
