First assignment! We were tasked to create 4 images that expressed different emotions.
We could either use photos or digitally paint from scratch and I chose to paint as it’s my point of interest.
THEME: Ocean of Feelings
As these sayings go, ‘you’re drowning in an ocean of feelings’; ‘waves of sadness hits you’, it’s a metaphorical way to describe how emotions can feel to a person.
I wanted to do something that wasn’t too literal in a sense whereby you can directly see the expressive features on a face, instead I wanted the environment or the ‘whole’ feel of the image to evoke its assigned emotion.
HAPPY
Happiness can be bubbly, hyper but what I chose to portray was the more serene and peaceful side of the spectrum. Everything is blissfully relaxing, the girl drawn and shown in clarity as she drifts off in the gentle waves. With the help of brighter, warmer colours, the image looks calm but still gives a sense of Happiness.
Inspired by the pink lakes in Australia that are so strange but gorgeous, it felt like the perfect environment for this emotion.
Process
For postprocessing I decided to edit the composition to bring in the girl closer and let the ocean fill up more of the space. And the colours were actually toned down a bit with cooler colours like purple as I realised later on that this image was too bright and popped out too much from the rest.
FEAR
Fear usually means a sense of dread, hopelessness as you fall deeper into depths of the unknown. So with that thought, a deep trench with an unending pit suited what I wished to go for. Real life deep trenches like the Mariana trench and Dean’s blue hole were the references I used.
Process
The hues for this are dark and foreboding, with hints of reds to pull in some visual interest. The central top point with the character is the only part that’s sort of illuminated whereas everything aside is hidden by shadows.
ANGER
Aggression, rage and fierceness are associated with anger. This feeling is vicious and strong and pulls you in deep unforgivingly, just like the ocean riptides and whirlpools. Sinking in your own personal riptide of strong emotions can be unrelenting, which is shown by the figure struggling as the water around gushes around without stop.
Process
The red and contrasting blue tones create this overwhelming feeling as they clash together to express something chaotic in nature. The character is placed in the centre region with the waves all going outwards from him, which guides the eye to the ‘object of interest’.
DISGUST
A common thing that’s thought to be unpleasant are looking at fish and specifically dead fish eyes. Making use of that fact, and inspired by how when sudden waves of dead fish end up on shore randomly, I drew many fish in a simple but ‘organised’ arrangement, imitating something similar to when dead fish just stack together.
Process
Grossness is done with goopy slime usually, which also happens to be green most of the time. I decided to swap to orange as the ‘water’ and green for the fish to kind of create this ‘uncomfortable’, contaminated effect as orange water doesn’t sit well with how clean and natural water should be. As an added effect, all the eyes of the fish are looking towards the character that’s hunched and perplexed.
Overall, this was kind of fun to do as we could experiment on what we wanted. At first I wanted to use daily objects to depict the emotions through the arrangement and composition. After some deliberation, I thought it felt too flat of a concept and changed my theme entirely into what it is now.
Here are just some sketches of previous scrapped ideas!
scrapped early on when initial idea was still Daily Objects
Fear and Disgust was changed because it didn’t feel as fitting
Though on my part, I did not have the best time management so I could not really edit and fix everything that I wished I could. But it was still a decent experience!
