Beautiful Oops

The idea of "Beautiful Oops" was to take a mistake made by an artist with paint blotches and turn it into something beautiful with whatever resources were wanted. For my "oops" I received a piece of paper with two very large blotches of black and some smaller blotches of black across the page. The point of this project in my head is sort of like "one man's trash is another man's treasure" in a sort of way, because one artist makes the mistake, but another can change and turn it into something beautiful in which you would never be able to tell it was a mistake in the first place.

As mentioned before, I received a page with a very very large black blotch on it, which I wasn't sure what to do with at first. Finally, after deciding my design, which is described in the next paragraph, I used a pencil to sketch out the main shapes of the shadow and the man. Then, I used acrylic paint to give it the sort of simplified look that I wanted it to have, which I wouldn't have been able to achieve with watercolor paints or colored pencils. The acrylic made everything one solid color which is what I wanted. I used a very tiny paintbrush to do the outlines of the man and shadow and also to paint the small details like the man's suit and the strings attached to the shadow.

My mom is what started the inspiration process for me. The first thing she said when I came to her idea-less was that the big huge black blotch looked like a man with a hat on. Then she also mentioned that it also sort of looked like a marionette puppet. At first I didn't like this idea at all, seeing as I have a fear of marionette puppets and dummies, and I wouldn't know what to do with the rest of the white space. Then I started thinking about puppets and how there is some type of metaphor to how people feel like puppets sometimes in their life, and that made me think what type of people feel like puppets. Immediately I thought of a stressed business man who may feel like he has no control over what he does, much like people in the movies. Then, using the idea of a marionette, I created a black silhouette of a marionette who is hanging uselessly and helplessly. Using the white space, I painted the business man and connected the marionette silhouette to his feet, making it look as though he is casting the marionette as his shadow.