For DA2002’s last assignment, we were told to come up with an art piece based on an impression we have on our partner. My partner was Melissa.
Melissa is a very quiet introvert. Unlike many others in the world who would like to take risks and stand out from the crowd, Melissa usually goes with the flow. She is pleasant, gentle and demure. These are characteristics I know I wanted to portray in my art piece.
Also, as a few of my friends and I hang out together in school with Mel alot, we noticed that she has very straight, long, black hair (before she cut it). Hence, it gave me the idea of wanting to use her hair as an idea for my artwork.
PROCESS:
For the first draft, I tested out the colours and flow on an A5 paper using soft pastels. The colours I chose were pretty bright and light.
Next, I went to create a second draft using acrylic paint. This time, the colours were a little too dark and it did not portray the feeling I wanted. Also, the lines were not very defined.
I then went on to sketch out the final image on an A2 sized paper.
FINAL + EXPLANATION
My art piece is an abstract piece, in attempt to showcase my impression of Melissa. As the idea came from me wanting to showcase her beautiful hair, the painting revolves around her hair which also doubles up as the sea.
I picked blue and green as the main colours which are analogous colours according to the colour wheel.
In this picture, the human face is actually based on a photograph of Melissa. Her beautiful hair is the represented by the mixture of the colours- green and blue which reminds people of the Earth. On the Earth, there are mainly two types of people, the introverts and the extroverts.
As mentioned earlier, Melissa is an introvert. She is softspoken and always shy to speak out. Hence, unlike a large ship (top left) , she doesn’t always stand out.
While a large ship is willing to take multiple risks across choppy seas, Mel goes with the flow while putting in hard work and effort, which is presented by the simple wooden boat. Since the wooden boat is representative of Mel, it is always placed closer to her human face in the painting.
The green lacey ribbons hints on Mel’s demure character and is green also because green is known to be a pleasing colour, which also reflects her.
The circles in the paintings also represents bubbles as Mel is often found to be day dreaming or in a daze.
I have also made used of the rule of odds here, where the three colours that would stand out are the browns and beige which are complementary colours to blue and green. This allows the audience to continuously move their eyes around the picture.
There is also a framing element around the ship and boat, separating these two different items. The bluish ribbon and high waves surrounds the larger ship, while the smaller boat is placed entirely on the peaceful sea.
CONCLUSION
One of the difficulties that I faced while completing this artpiece was choosing the right combination of colours. While I wanted the three items (ship, boat and face) to stand out, I had to be careful not to select a complementary colour, but at the same time, I wanted to create sort of a balance in the painting so that it would not be overly blue.
However, I felt that it was a nice experience to complete an abstract piece as viewers can have different personal opinions about the completed artwork.