First Semester's Favourite

Sorry for the quality - this is a picture I took with my computer's web cam so I could show a friend.  The actual piece is with my Colour in Context teacher and I never got the chance to properly scan it.

I really like this artwork because of the freedom we had with the project.  First, we had to pick our favourite picture by our favourite artist and make our own picture drawing inspiration from the chosen piece.  I chose Magritte's The Kiss as inspiration.  I am a huge fan of surrealism and specifically Magritte (and Dali, but don't get me started.)  The haunting nature of veiled faces was something that I really wanted to dissect.

Another thing we had to do was plan our colour palette.  The one I chose was Saturation Contrast.  In theory, the colour (blue in my case) will pop if it's surrounded by muted colours like greys. I think that sometimes our problem as artists and designers is that we want to use too many colours.  In this project, it really clicked with me that less can be more if used smartly.

Another thing I really liked about this project was that we could choose any media we wanted.  Until this point, all the projects I had done were either in paint or on the computer.  And paint isn't my favourite and computers… they REALLY aren't my favourite.  I like using the good old graphite pencils and pencil crayons.  They are what I grew up using and what I'm comfortable with.  Until this point, I'd been a good sport about trying new things, but I was itching to get back to what I knew.

Saying that, this drawing wasn't easy.  I easily spent over 12 hours shading the fabric folds.  But because I was familiar with the medium, I wanted to push myself with it.  I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

I learnt so much over the course of these few months.  I'm sad to leave this semester behind, but I'm also really excited to continue on, living and learning.

Leanna.