Character Assignment

For this assignment, I decided to use mermaids as my characters and put their setting somewhere deep under the sea.  In my story, industrialization and the use of dark magic are destroying the under sea environment much as they have destroyed above water and the atmosphere. Two in the middle of the struggle would be Elysia, an advocate for the return to natural rule and harmony with the environment, and Adrienne, a powerful member of the ruling class of industry.  In this scene, Elysia is trapped by Adrienne in a remote section of no mans land, and is subjected to dark magic.  When thinking of a scene I immediately remembered no mans land from the world wars in europe and used that as my inspiration for this area.  The hands coming up are supposed to represent those fallen in the crisis and how industry will eventually destroy all good.

For this project I showed my animals movement by stretching out the tentacles and curving them upwards to show that he's floating down into the seaweed.  The prismacolors I found were very useful for this piece especially because I did a lot of layering and shadows on my octopus and they apply very smooth and light.  I found activities like the paper bag and paper curls to be surprisingly useful when I drew this figure because they taught me how light works and which sections of something should be light and which should be dark accordingly.  The biggest challenge for me I think was the seaweed because it took so long to show lights and darks on every piece and also the octopus took many layers because it's yellow on such dark paper.

Proportion I think is most important in a drawing due to the fact it's what makes or breaks a work as realistic.  Proportion is what makes a piece look distinctly human, and often can show the age of the person being drawn.  In my drawing I started with the drawing of ovals, which I found to be a very helpful technique, and then drawing the clothes over as I saw them on Caroline.  I liked watching the videos of the techniques and found the quick draws to be the most effective way for me to learn to draw people.  I hadn't ever tried a person before this really and that was a big challenge for me but I feel that the transitions between activities was very nice and while I did like doing the longer sketch I had trouble with the details.

For this post I used watercolors as well as the pen and ink technique of stippling to create my piece.  The theme was 'Oh the Places You'll Go' and I decided that I wanted to take my place to a place of Enlightenment so I used the traditional form of Sidharta in a lotus to embody this.  Over the piece I found the watercolor to be my favorite part and the stippling of the larger lotus to be the most difficult and time consuming part of the piece. 

Paper Bag

I believe value is important in order to portray shadows and make a piece feel realistic.  My biggest problem with this piece was the detail.  It took me a very long time to get an outline drawn of this piece and the detail was very time consuming when putting in shadows and shading. I used a lot of fading with the pencil from dark areas into the light and kept some edges white in order to make my piece feel more real.

When we received the interesting point of view project, the first thing I thought of was bugs.  While my idea did originate with a bumblebee, it progressed to a Luna Moth after I saw their unique antennae.  I think the point of view of my piece impacts the onlooker because it isn't the typical view Luna Moths are seen from.  Famous for their green wings, Luna moths are usually only seen from the back or above.  When looking at the creative process I did have some difficulty with portraying the hairy arms of the insect at first but after a few thumbnails figured it out.  This was a very time consuming piece for me given the structures and shading of the wings and legs but overall I'm pretty proud of how it came out.