Theme The theme of the piece focuses on the idea of being dissatisfied while at the same time not taking action to better it. I wanted to capture the feeling of waiting for things to change, but never taking the steps to make those changes happen. I tried to show this feeling through symbolism in my piece. In the piece I used the bus stop to symbolize the idea of constantly waiting. The person with their eyes closed emphasizes the fact that no action is taken while she nods off. I wanted to use the colors to emphasize a rainy and dreary feeling. I did this by using purple and having the colors look hazy and flow past the lines of the objects of the piece.
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When brainstorming ideas for my piece I had two ideas for what I wanted to do with the background. One approach I had was that I could create a piece with a city landscape in the background with things such as a concrete ground, barb wire fencing, and utility poles. My second idea was to create more of a rural scene adding trees, plants and other natural elements. I made thumbnail sketches of both and ultimately decided that although the more industrial take emphasized a dreariness to the piece, I felt that I could add much more detail to a piece that incorporated nature giving it more depth.
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One thing I experimented with was whether or not I should use lineart before or after I lay down my water color. I first started by testing using pen overtop watercolor on the left side. I painted a swatch of my watercolor and three shapes. Once the paint was dry I tested my pen overtop the watercolor and outlined the shapes I created. On the right I started by testing my pen and drawing outlines of shapes. After I left the pen to dry I painted over my pen tests and filled in each of the outlined shapes. I found that when I used the water color before the lineart it made it hard to perfectly draw the lines around the already painted shapes. I also found that when using the pen over the paint it seemed to be slightly drying out the pen and would cause the nib to become clogged. When using the watercolor over the pen I found that it slightly dulled the darkness of the lines, but I thought that I could maybe use this to an advantage in my piece because it could make everything look more unified. Doing this also helped for things to be more precise as it was much easier to fill in already defined shapes with paint. For my final piece I decided to ink the piece before I used the watercolor.
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Similarities
-Both Percival’s and my piece use consistent line weight in the lineart. -My piece and many of Percival’s pieces use a limited color palette. -Similarly to Percival’s pieces, my piece blends watercolors together past the defined lines. -Both my piece and Percival’s piece contrast cool colors with warm colors. -Both my piece and Percival's are city landscapes. Differences -Unlike Percival’s work, I choose to include a character in my piece. -My illustration tells a story unlike Percival’s work that is based in factual representation of a realistic scene. -Percival’s work has been created for the purpose of reference in books and brochures where my art is an individual piece. |