Inclusion Project

In my art, you can clearly see lots of colorful flowers, vines, and body parts/wheels. The story told is that everyone in this community will grow together no matter who they are. Each body part represents different disabilities that may occur amongst a community. I chose to make this because I like to incorporate nature into everyday things or activities, in this case, I connected nature's growth to disabilities. This relates to my life because I have a little cousin with Rett syndrome. She's three and has already lost her ability to use different parts of her body so I incorporate those, such as wheels for a wheelchair. I love nature and I love my little cousin so I wanted to show a connection amongst them through the growth of communities.

My work was made by creating a border then adding a sketch of where I wanted the different flowers, vines, and body parts placed. I then went in with watercolor and colored all of the flowers bright colors. I made the background with light green watercolor and made small swirl brush strokes to create the look of texture. I mixed the same light green with black to make the leaves stand out. For body parts, I added eyes, feet, arms, ears, brains, scribbles (these last two for mental disabilities), lips, and hands (sign language). I added a banner that's being held up by both hands and feet, and vines reading, "Communities grow together." Once I finished using watercolor I went over everything with pen, some of the pens were glitter or metallic so they stood out. I decided last minute to cut my border to half an inch and making the vines grow off of it to draw attention to my piece.

The process of creating my art included a lot of building up the color to make it stand out more. My project evolved because at first I had a really light green background with no type of texture appearance. Then I went in and create dark swirl strokes with my brush to add more detail to the background. I also did a lot of outlining with pens which made each flower and body part stand out more. My next steps could be to work on balancing color. I want to work on making certain objects pop out, similar to my yellow banner does. I don't want different parts of my piece to take away from the main part. Overall, I am very proud of how well I built up the color and detail in the piece.