Gnome

The mythical creature I thought of based on the element of earth is a gnome. I had researched images of gnomes online and they were surprisingly difficult to find (possibly because they don't exist), but found some I liked eventually. I wanted to continue with the use of unusual and innovative materials so chose to use twig and ink because they're relevant to earth and are also interesting to use. Below is the outcome of this drawing.

Outcome of gnome drawing

Fly away fairy

Using an image I'd sketched in the research section I drew a detailed pencil drawing of a fairy.

Fairy pencil drawing

Which I then traced using layout paper to use as a stencil for spray painting. This involved the painstaking job of sitting there cutting out tiny sections of paper with a utility knife that I'd got from my dad as I don't have a craft knife. The stencil was very fragile and delicate, so I only did a couple of sprays. The first was with a combination of black and white paint on a grey-ish background to create silver tones and the second was with black spray paint on a white background.

Stencil

Sprayed stencil on white background

Before removing the stencil

Voilaaa!

Starting development

I began the development section with a mindmap recapping all of the work I'd done so far throughout the research section and some research in to existing murals to give me inspiration on where to start. 

Mindmap

The aspect from the research section that I liked and wanted to explore further was the idea of mythical research so I drafted out a timetable with ideas on how I would development my findings from the research section.

Further mythical research - sketches

Another section from my mythical research that I found inspirational due to its symbolism was Paganism, so I did a separate illustrated mind map of aspects from it.

Mindmap (don't know how to rotate)

I did further mythical research, which comprised of finding tons of visual research from the internet and it was quite hard to find images I was happy with of things such as mermaids and fairies, but I found the site WeHeartIt quite useful, especially for the mermaid images. I put all the images on a word document that I could use for future reference. I selected several images from each of the elements to do sketches of, which are below:

Earth

Air

Fire

Water

Mythical Research

Throughout the research section I had been doing a small amount of mythical research and created the pieces of work below, which are inspired by the ancient ideas of the elements.

Water

Air

Earth

Fire

These didn't link that well with the rest of my project as I hadn't done much other mythical research so proceeded to do some more. This began with an in depth work document, which I went on to summarise with an illustrated mindmap, that explored the elements and their meanings in a variety of different cultures. 

Mindmap