Under the Sea

Moving back onto the water section now... and back to the use of the unusual materials of bleach, ink and wax.  I started by drawing out jellyfish shapes onto the page and rubbing over them with a white wax candle to use it as a resist against the ink, followed by covering the whole page with blue Quink ink. Below is a photo of how it looked at this stage. It was difficult to see where on the page I'd put the wax as it's the same colour as the paper so I missed some areas, meaning some of the jellyfish had blue areas when they should have been white all over.

I painted out the blue areas within the jellyfish with bleach and then also used the bleach to add in more tentacles for the jellyfish and to add some detail to the background. As the bleach soaks into the page it creates an almost luminescent effect, which I feel is relevant for the jellyfish.

Before the bleach soaked in

Final outcome

I'm pleased with this piece of work and like its abstract nature as it's different in style from a lot of my other pieces of artwork.

Dragon

I messed around with the order a bit again and this piece of work is something I went back to at the end once I had spare time but is relevant to the fire section of the development. It is one of the pieces of work that I'm most proud of from during this project. I had planned in my timetable to do a drawing of a dragon and/or lion and since I had the time thought I may as well do the drawing of the dragon too.

I'd been looking into buying Letraset Promarkers for a while but was always put off due to their high price. Fortunately I'd recently bought a large selection of colours of Sharpie markers and a good price and learnt that they could be blended in a similar way to the Promarkers. Before using them for my dragon drawing I wanted to experiment first and drew a couple of daffodils with them to try out the technique.

Daffodil drawing

Once I was confident with the technique needed I begun work on the dragon drawing. I drew the outline in fineliner and then used a combination of Sharpie pens and charcoal to add the shading and tone.

Outline

Final outcome

I'm particularly proud of the outcome of this, especially since it's in a different style to the rest of my work - much more illustrative - and is done using a medium I have little previous experience with.

Rawr

An animal that I relate to fire is the lion, especially if it is roaring and has a massive mane. I think this is due to the similar colour palette of lions and flames and a lion's fiery personality. Having made the link between fire and lions, I chose to draw a lion as part of the development section of my project using conte crayons.

Final outcome of the lion drawing

Butterfly Flutter By

This wasn't quite the order I did things in, but let's just pretend it was...

After I'd done some printing and stencil work with the butterfly shapes my tutor suggested it might be a good idea to add in some detailed drawings and patterns within the shapes of the butterflies. Not wanting, to get behind on my work and not knowing if I'd get the extension I'd applied for I decided to do some other timetabled work and then go back to this if I had time at the end.

I drew the first designs with sharpie marker pens and then added in a chalk outline to make the shape more obvious.

On the second page of designs, I used three different techniques. I had planned to do a detailed pencil drawing but the print was on the wrong paper for this, so the pencil didn't blend too well and I couldn't get it to a really dark tone as it was on pink sugar paper. I went over the pencil in black sharpie pen and ended up creating a silver colour, which was a pleasant surprise. In the second butterfly I drew a detailed design using a combination of black fineliner pen and black sharpie pen and in the last butterfly, I drew in some patterns with black marker pen and then added in some colour with sharpie pens.

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

Drawings influenced by the Chinese elements

The Chinese elements were ones that particularly stood out to me as I felt they had the most potential for developing into interesting drawings due to all of their symbols that link to the elements. Below is a piece of work I did researching three of the elements further. I chose those three elements as wood and metal (which are the other two) don't overlap with my original four elements of fire, water, air and earth.

Using this information as inspiration I went on to do two illustrations based on the elements of fire and water. Although in reality I did the illustrations before writing out the research work, the ideas and thought processes were still all in my mind.

Completed illustrations

Too Hot to Handle

I began my research work into fire with an experimental mixed media piece of art that included the materials of wax, wood, wallpaper, card and paint. Firstly, using one of my images from the original visual research to inspire me I drew a bonfire onto wallpaper which I'd stuck onto cardboard for support. Next I drew out the log areas and used a variety of wooden materials, such as matches and bamboo skewers I glued them down and built them up on the page to create a raised log effect. One of the more unusual things I've done in this project is using wax to create low relief surface texture on my painting. I melted candles on the saucepan and then poured and molded the wax into the desired flame shapes. Once this had dried I painted a fire over it using oil paints.

End Result

Whilst I'm really pleased with the outcome of this piece of work, it's really fragile and difficult to find somewhere to keep it as I'm scared it will break if I put it in my portfolio!!

First Research work and ideas

I have a slight back log of work to post about as I've been doing this course for a couple of weeks and haven't posted any work yet, so will be posting about a few things retrospectively.

For my first section I did general research work of all 4 elements, which consisted of brainstorms on paper painted in colours that I thought represented the elements; so browns and greens for earth, blues and greys for air, reds and oranges for fire and blues and greens for water. I also researched images that I thought represented each element and printed them off to make a collage and included a couple my own sketches too, amongst the printed off images. Below are images of these pieces of work.

AIR brainstorm

AIR collage

EARTH brainstorm

WATER brainstorm

WATER collage

EARTH collage

FIRE brainstorm

FIRE collage

So why make a blog?

So I've made and re-made countless blogs over the past few years, some of which I've kept to myself and some of which I've shared around. I plan to use this one to document my progress through my final stage of my art and design foundation diploma; I'll be including images of my work and of my inspiration and writing about my thoughts and processes along the way.

I've written my own brief for this project, which is:

"I plan to explore the contrast and mythical meanings between the elements of Air, Fire, Water and Earth, using a variety of media and find ways in which they can be incorporated into other situations, such as portraiture, figure, etc, in order to create a mural based on these discoveries. I will also explore the connections between them and ways in which they can be linked and combined."

I'll hopefully be posting fairly frequently as I want to use this blog as part of my project, so stop by and browse a while....