Layout:
Artistic intention:
Through this layout, I plan to bring out the concept of an overload of emotions and not able to decide on one of them to fully express. Each of the flowers show emotions in the language of flowers, for
example, the lavender represents purity, the daisy represents attachment, the rose represents affection, the gentian represents gratitude, the lily represents virtue and the heather represents solitude. The hands at the bottom trying to catch the dripping emotions from the flowers show how the person isn’t able to pick an emotion to express leading them to getting influenced a little by all and creating mixed emotions in the end.
Exploration:
1) Hands
Drawing:
I tried drawing and shading the hands with soft pastels so that I get a basic idea of where it should be lighter and where the hands should be left dark. Filling in the hands also made me realize that I have to work on my attention to detail specially for the fingers because while I was in the process of shading there were many instances when the colours would spread too much or merge too much making the proportions of the hand go haywire.
The biggest challenge I faced while doing so was shading the third set of hands(see pictures below) because the fingers overlapped and I wasn’t able to merge the colours properly and the hands seemed out of proportion and I couldn’t work on it further because that would only make it worse. However I was able to understand why that happened after a little more research on soft pastels and will be improving my skills throughout this artwork.
Shading
Exploring and experimenting with these hand gestures also gave me a little more confidence for my final art piece, as now I know where I have to be careful and at the same time I also enhanced my skills of drawing and shading.
2) Flowers
After that, I painted my rough layout as a practice:
Rough Layout:
While looking at my layout I realized that the colours of the
flowers were very stiff and didn't look as expressive and flowy as I wanted them to look. So my teacher and I discussed and worked further on them to make them look as genuine as possible. We came up with much better flowers in the final artwork compared to the rough I also decided to
remove the daisy from the group of flowers as it looked as though it was being forced into the piece and didn't match with the artwork. Plus, disturbance is something I didn't want to represent through this artwork so we thought it was best to remove it.
Painting the final flowers:
Process/Materials:
What artistic skills did I develop?
Overall I feel like this artwork shows my learning as an artist. Before I created this piece, creating human elements used to be my least favourite thing out of everything to create. However the practice and the effort put into this artwork made me develop that skill to the extent that I was able to create these shaded hands with ease, and will surely continue to create more artworks with human elements in them. Before creating this artwork, soft pastels weren’t my strong point and I always found it difficult to find the right shade to merge into another shade, however after exploring, experimenting and developing this art piece I can now courageously use soft pastels in other pieces I make at home as well. Lastly, another element that I was afraid of creating before were flowers, even though I love flowers and their beauty, I could never get myself to find the right colours and techniques to create good looking flowers. This artwork gave me the opportunity to practice and develop this skill. And even though these flowers appear to be very stiff and have minimum flow in them, it was still a start to my journey of creating flowers in the future and will work on developing this skill.
How does the piece justify the Intended Outcome?
This artwork shows the intended outcome of one being overloaded with emotions as well, that is because the flowers represent different emotions and the hand represents a person, and since there are many flowers, clearly larger that the hands hand take the artwork shows a person encumbered with emotions. Apart from that, since this artwork has been divided equally on the top and bottom (top contains flowers, bottom contains the hand), this piece is also well balanced and has a sense of movement and rhythm in it.
What helped me?
Creating a painted layout really helped develop the exploration part of this artwork because that made me understand how much time and effort would go into creating a bigger piece. The layout helped me discover places I could face challenges in for example, getting paint on the already shaded hands, not having correct flower proportions, the background colour being too dark. These challenges I faced while making the layout were things that I could easily overcome by using my critical thinking skills and organizing my process in such a way that I don’t face any of these hurdles again.
What did I learn from this artwork?
This artwork not only helped me develop new skills but also taught me other things that I would be able to use in the future. For example, I realized that sometimes changing your original layout to something with the same subjects but different placements can help express the artistic intention better and would lead to an expressionistic art piece. Apart from that when considering the techniques, I learnt that giving just two coats to the background isn’t enough sometimes and can make your artwork look untidy later on. Which is why giving different number of coats to different places is okay and should be followed. These learnings not only helped me make my artwork better, but also helped me develop as an artist.
Floriography(language of flowers):
Completing this artwork helped me develop my knowledge on the language of flowers and their importance in the real world. If I hadn’t thought of using flowers as a method to express emotions, I wouldn’t have gained the valuable information that I did through researching and reading about the meaning behind multiple flowers.
Inspiration from Literature:
Apart from that, I got inspired to show emotions through the flowers as I had recently read the book “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde and be had used multiple flowers as a representation of multiple emotions. Reading and studying the book and its use of floriography made me realize the beauty of flowers and how they can not only be used for aesthetics in an artwork but also to show emotion and a concept can revolve around them.
Quotes from the book:
“...and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac“
● Here lilac represents “youth”
“Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum”
● Here laburnum represents “forsaken, pensive beauty”
Evaluation of Media - Soft pastels
Through this art piece I was able to explore the medium of soft pastels and how they can be used to shade parts of the body such as the hand. The ability for them to merge well into each other makes the hand look more realistic and gives it a subtle and soft tone. On the other hand, working with soft pastels
also taught me how important it is to work with a light hand and be careful around my art because one harsh stroke can lead to the whole piece getting ruined. I also used acrylic paints for this artwork, and since I had worked with acrylic paint before, I was able to execute the designer effect without much
difficulty .
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