Theme For the theme of my piece I based it around the idea of how life and death are interconnected. Death is inevitable, but that death can fertilize new growth, new life and beauty into the world. The girl underground is surrounded by the roots of the plant to show how she’s being used to give nutrients to the plant and new beginnings.
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I first started my sketching with making a rough layout for how I wanted the piece to look. My first idea was to have a person buried underground with fossils and a flower sprouting roots into the ground around them. I then tested out the idea of having more plants than just the one flower. Ultimately I decided not to go with this idea because I felt it took attention away from the main idea of the piece. I then sketched some ideas more for fossils and bones that could surround the person. Finally I took these ideas and drew out a more cleaned up version closer to what I wanted the final piece to look like.
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While painting I experimented with different ways to add texture to my piece. I was specifically focused on the dirt background behind the girl and the fossils. I felt that because it was such a large area with only one color it looked very flat and uninteresting. I thought by finding a way to add texture it would allow for there to be more visual interest and would make the background look more dirt like. I tested three ways of adding texture with the paint. These ways were through vertical lines, horizontal lines, and stippling dots with darker and light shades of brown. In the end I decided to use the vertical lines in combination with a some dots.
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Similarities
-Similar limited, warm toned color palette to John Dunstell’s Studies of Walnuts and Hazelnuts. -Both my piece and Dunstells and Grierson’s pieces included plant life as a central component. -I tried to incorporate the softens of the flowers that comes across in Grierson’s work -I incorporated the roots of the flower as a main part of my piece similar to Grierson’s piece. Differences -My piece isn’t a study of plants like Dunstall’s and Grierson’s works are. -Unlike Dunstall and Grierson my piece is not focused on scientific accuracy of plantlife. -My piece included a human subject while Dunstall’s and Grierson’s did not. -The plant in my piece was not created from a real life model. |