Two Dead Flowers - Watercolour

This piece is also an A6 watercolour, I really enjoyed painting the dead flowers as they were a lot more textured and varied than the live flowers. I found that they really dried out and the petals shrivelled up into interesting and delicate looking shapes. They also became very distorted, however still look like flowers.

I plan to make the green and white/grey flowers a real feature in a lot, if not all of my paintings, and have them become a kind of motif, and to create a sense of continuity through out all of my paintings. So that they can be displayed well as a series, but they should still work on their own too.

 

   

A6 Heart And Flowers Illustration

The image below is an A6 (postcard watercolour paper) watercolour, I found an image of a dissected heart that I thought was really beautiful and decided that I wanted to include it in a painting.

I was inspired by some of the illustrations and drawings, that I found while I was doing my research, to add in the flowers to the composition. And I feel that this worked really well and made the image a lot more interesting and intriguing than it just being a watercolour painting of a heart. However I made my painting different to the illustrations I had seen by painting in dead flowers rather than live ones.

As I was collecting images and things to draw from during this project, I bought some flowers, with the intention of painting and drawing from them, as I thought it would be better to draw from life rather than photographs. However I decided that I actually preferred to draw from the flowers when they were dead more than I did when they were alive. I feel that the dead, dried out flowers are much more interesting and have a beautiful texture to them. Especially with this piece, I feel that the juxtaposition between the flowers and the heart works really well and that some of the shapes and patterns in the dissected heart are mimicked by the shapes in the flowers, and they really complement each other visually.

 



Open Mouth With Flower - Watercolour

My idea for this piece came from the research I had done, looking at images from 'Fantastic Voyage' and on Pinterest.

 

I liked the idea of the flowers growing inside the body and the being able to see them once the body was dissected. (This reminded me of the stories that you get told as a child about the kid that ate the orange seed and then an orange tree grew inside them)

I also found these images on Pinterest these Lynn Skordal images (Flower Torture - You Must Eat This Marigold) and thought that they were really interesting images, and inspired this watercolour painting.

 

Lynn Skordal:

 

 

My Watercolour Painting:

 

I think this painting worked well and this technique make the painting more interesting unusual and striking.



Life Drawing 1

Evaluation So Far:

On Thursday mornings I have been attending the life drawing classes, and so far I have really enjoyed these sessions. During the classes I have been incorporating my initial project ideas into my work and I feel that this has worked really well and I have created some really interesting and unique pieces.

I have incorporated flowers into my life drawings and paintings, in a few different ways (see images below). I particularly like the line drawings, as I think that they are quite unusual and I feel visually they work really well. (In some ways they are an extension and development of some of the pieces/collages that I created for my obsessions project last year (see images), yet they fit well into this years project too). I think that they make really cool/weird little illustrations.

I also created tis watercolour painting in a similar way (during the same session). I drew in flowers instead of including the head and face within the piece to add a little mystery to it and to keep the subject/model anonymous. I feel that this makes the painting more interesting than it just being a traditional life drawing piece, and this anonymous technique is something that I would like to experiment and continue with a lot more during the rest of this project.    

 

 



 

A piece from my project last year that is visually similar:

 

 

Main Technique - Watercolour

 

For this project I plan to create most of my visuals in watercolour and fine liner pen.

I have experimented with this technique in past projects, however it has never been a main technique and I would like to experiment with it further during this project. 

 

Method:

I start by drawing a basic line drawing of what I want to paint in pencil. I then start adding the colour, I use watercolour in layers so that the colour becomes more varied and not as neat. I finally outline the whole piece using a 0.25mm fine tip pen, (outlining all the variations in colour too).

 

This one of my first experimental pieces for this project:

 

 

Research

I started doing research for this project by looking at video clips and stills from the film 'Fantastic Voyage'. Doing this helped me develop some visual ideas and the type of work I wanted to create. I also started looking on Pinterest at medical and anatomical drawings and illustrations, for things like skeletal and muscle structure and cells. On Pinterest I found some really interesting and unusual pieces, this did slightly change some of my ideas, as I wanted to look more at want was under the skin (such as the muscles and bones) rather than deeper inside the human body (like blood cells and the inside of the stomach and lungs). This took my ideas slightly away from the 'Fantastic Voyage' images/idea, however I still want to explore the human body. And looking at the Fantastic voyage imagery was the starting point for all of the research that I have done so far, even though the work I plan to create isn't a direct representation of the film imagery, it is where my ideas started.

Fantastic Voyage Images:

 

Pinterest Research:

 

 

  

Uni - 2nd Year [New Project] - Painting

 

Fantastic Voyage - Painting Project

 

At the start of the year we were give the choice of four projects to take part in over the year, out of the choices I chose the painting project, and the sub-theme of 'Fantastic Voyage'.

The 'Fantastic Voyage theme was based on the film of the same name, and explore the inside of the human body.

 

My plan for this project is to explore the human body by looking at what is underneath the skin. As I have been researching this theme I have looked at a lot of anatomical and medical illustrations (mainly on Pinterest). And by looking at more fine art and abstract illustrations I have come across many images and collages that incorporate floral aspects, this is something that I would like to explore and experiment with in my own work, as I thought that this was an interesting concept as human and floral anatomy is very similar.

To make my work different to the images that I have seen during my research I plan to incorporate dead and dried flowers into my drawings and paintings. This idea was formed when I was researching, and that when the very first anatomical drawings were created there wasn't any of the technology that we have today to help us look under the skin and inside the body, this meant that they had to draw from dead bodies to create accurate images. And I wanted to have a link to the history by including and drawing from dead flowers in my pieces.

 

During this project I would like to create beautiful, detailed and accurate anatomy and ecorche illustrations that incorporate flowers in an interesting way.