My Identity
The theme chosen for my final artwork, My Identity, is to use different techniques through the artworks while showing emotion. Half of my artwork is a small piece of paper cut out into a circle with a drawing/painting of my dog Buster in the middle of it. For this artwork I coloured in the drawing with pencils then a wet brush was wiped over the colouring to blend the pencil colourings in so that it looked more realistic. The other half of my artwork is a rainbow fish painting with little water ripples under it having the illusion of it jumping out of the water. The rainbow fish artwork was painted then painted over again with a sparky white to show how the scales look in real life.
I believe this artwork is plays a big part in my identity; I am motivated to explore these ideas because Buster has been my pet for my whole life, since I was born and the rainbowfish also plays a part in my identity because I like fishing, camping, hunting while still having nice and expensive things. I want to share with viewers how pretty nature can be and how my dog acted like in real life. This is why I chose to use Buster’s artwork was coloured in with coloured pencils and blended in with a paintbrush to blend the colours in more, so it looked more natural and didn’t have rough lines from the pencils.
The Rainbowfish painting is dry brush painted then outlined with fine liner. Buster’s artwork used the circulism technique when shading and colouring in the picture, when blending in the colours I used a wet paint brush to make it look softer. Rainbowfish painting used the dry brush technique to paint the inside of the fish and the ripple. The ripples look more like water because I didn’t use watercolour paper and instead used normal paper, this means when I used more water on a certain colour it was easier for the paint to spread throughout the paper causing it to look more like water then the fish painting did.
Nancy Merkle and her ‘Red Fish’ painting influenced me on my own Rainbowfish painting. I liked the way she used the watercolour paints and how she painted the dimensions. The ‘Buster’ artwork I tried to show happiness and joy, I tried to make his face look happy, I wanted it to make you smile when you see it. In the ‘Rainbowfish’ artwork I tried to show the correct colours a real rainbow fish would have and show its shinny scales in the painting.
My goal with these two artworks is to create a smile on people’s faces when they see them. I think the ‘Rainbowfish’ artwork helped me reach my goals because I got to use my watercolour techniques in the design. ‘Buster’ artwork I had to improvise with because I didn’t like my final design, I didn’t want to turn in something I didn’t like so I started again but only had a few minutes to create it before the lesson was going to end.
The artwork displays my identity which is my dog and what I love doing. I wanted to inspire people to be confident in themselves and what they like to do, to share it with others and not be scared of being judged. I learned that using a wet paint brush is easier to blend in coloured pencil and making it look more natural. ‘Rainbowfish’ artwork came out better than I thought it would, but the Buster artwork didn’t come out as I thought it would, the artwork looks good but didn’t look how I thought it would. In the future I will start earlier in case I make a mistake on the final, so I have time to create another if needed.
