Click on each photo to find out more about its corresponding emotion:

1
Drained – feeling exhausted and left with nothing after expending energy
Using styrofoam to print, I noticed that with more prints, the ink faded out and the organic shape felt increasingly weaker, almost like waves washing up to the shores.
Hence I started with a dark and black fill at the top of the piece to show the initial fullness of energy. Then I made marks across the paper that mostly had decreasing ink and pressure on. This made the mark’s shape, with spaces between them, muddier and more unclear, to show the expending of energy in an unpleasant manner. By the end of the piece at the bottom, there is only white space to show a depletion and having nothing left. Also, a top to bottom view could be seen as trying to pour out more energy and hence is a very fast process towards nothingness. 

2
Anxious – not calm because of many different negative thoughts that occupy my headspace
In general, I do get slightly anxious before engaging in anything out of my comfort zone, and an example would be that of heading to an interview. Many questions and thoughts about what the interviewer might ask, will I be able to answer them, whether I am still on time, do I sound weird etc will suddenly be of concern to me and cause me to feel anxious.
Hence, I wanted to bring contrast to this piece with the calmness of the lighter watercolour-like texture in the background against the darker, sharper erratic lines in the foreground. The sharper and yet jagged dark lines in all directions represent my negative thoughts, which come together to form a sense of anxiousness. 
The background was first sprayed with water with a little paint. After, I dripped more paint on some parts and spread the paint outwards with a palette knife to create sharper lines.  

3
Bewildered – have many worries, confusions and is perplexed
Bewildered also encompasses the inability to have clear thinking. Usually, I feel this emotion when I had an initial opinion on something but then become unsure due to events and distractions that oppose my initial opinions, and cause me to question the original thought.
I wanted the straight lines to show how there was a direction that I believed in but many things are clouding the view. Even the straight lines are made from distressed brushes to show and question how the original aim seemed to not be stable in the first place too. Splatters of ink and smudged toothbrush marks serve to act like all the different situations and worries that appear, creating confusion.

 

4
Attraction – coming closer together, could become balanced, could create sparks
For this emotion, I wanted to show how two items could be going towards each other in a more engaging composition, which was an S-shaped curved. By breaking it into two parts, show how attraction can result in becoming balanced. The two parts are also narrower at the center to represent heading in the direction towards the center/each other.

For this piece, I made a few copies of slight variations. At the start, I just wanted two things to seem to go towards each other. I quite liked the effect of the parallel lines made from fruit mesh wrap, versus the dragging of rope. While I thought the mesh wrap marks seemed less elegant, they represented more excitement from a feeling of attraction. 

However, it seemed boring and similar on both ends. With the opposites attract rule in mind, I tried out different inks namely the darker acrylic paint and lighter calligraphy ink, to introduce a bit of difference in colour and texture. After, I was unsatisfied as the composition still seemed still so I decided to incorporate the idea of balance and more pleasure and positivity with curved shapes.  With acrylic paint, I also dragged the mesh wrap outwards for a sense of movement due to how it was “going against gravity” from bottom up. The sense of movement was also desirable for showing an act of coming together. 

5
Fear – irrational, unknown and overwhelming
I created this piece with the bottom of a cardboard tray. During exploration, I thought the print was sinister looking already and hence appropriate for this emotion. Also, as a shape that was not geometric and had an empty core, it seemed to represent a sense of the unknown. I wanted the feeling of getting overwhelmed and it is paralleled to how the marks seem to spread towards the bottom right and get more intense through the darker tones (against a lighter top left). On a closer look, the cardboard fibres also made the texture of the marks look more alive and dangerous.

 

 

6
Almost Hopeless – trying to be positive amongst negativities but failing
This was the emotion that was hardest to capture in a word, as “almost hopeless” was more specific to something felt before breaking down into absolute sorrow or before turning the situation around and striving on. An occasion when I felt such emotion was when I was in a String Ensemble in Secondary School. As a player that lacked in skills, I felt like I was constantly pointed out by the conductor to improve. This made me feel self-conscious and demoralised. However, I could not just break down in front of everyone and had to keep up a front, to be determined to play better. As time went on, it certainly got tougher as the music became more difficult while I struggled to keep up. Hence, like my definition, I was trying to stay positive despite all the negative feedback/thoughts and seemed to be getting tougher to stay positive.
Hence the black patch made by brush strokes shows the negativity. It is also further emphasised with the drier strokes at the sides to show the exhaustion and how the composition is towards the bottom to show the heaviness and pressure of the negativity. In the slightly off-center circle, it is the only brighter part amongst the negativity. This shows how the positive part still exists. However, it is not all bright due to how it seems like it is getting consumed by the darkness, showing difficulties in trying to survive, and might be failing. The “consumption” is represented by strokes made by using a palette knife to spread ink towards the center of the circle.  

 

Conclusion
In the process of working on project one, some of my challenges were:

– making a visually interesting mark for the emotion I wanted to portray
 Initially, I was thinking of what each mark I made looked like physically (e.g. like barbed wires) instead of how the abstract marks could mirror my definition of the emotions. However, with more practice and consultations, I felt that I was able to create more visually interesting marks to bring across my selected emotions. First, was to break down how and when I felt the emotion, and then represent them with the marks. A huge takeaway was that contrast was especially important to bring visual interest to a piece of artwork. The viewer can then see the differences through the contrast and feel the emotion through the part that is more prominent to the eye.

– identifying a specific emotion from the marks I made
Associating a word with some marks I made was not simple like the one for “almost hopeless”. I managed to find more ease at doing so after I broke out of restricting myself to just a single word and to allow for levels of a certain emotion. After all, someone can be just a little happy at times while super happy at other times. This also helped me in making my artwork more or less intense to match my definition of a specific emotion more closely.