Circles

Pop of Flavor is an abstract painting of a girl eating an ice cream cone. This was inspired by my previous "Beautiful Oops" project of which I created a child who dropped her ice cream. The circles in the background made me think of a scene from Ratatouille where the main character, Remi, tells his brother to close his eyes and gives him a piece of cheese and strawberry to eat together. Remi tells him to think about the sweet and savory flavor medley and as his brother is tasting this new food, the background turns black and little explosions of color go off, visually representing what he's tasting.

To create this work I used canvas paper, a circle stencil to draw out the different sized circles, and acrylic paint to bring it to life.

I began by sketching out my idea of the scoop of ice cream being the focal point of the painting and having many randomly placed circles as a background. I chose to make a painting on a piece of canvas paper using acrylic paint. I started by drawing the ice cream scoop, then built off of that using a stencil to draw the circles. I then drew in details such as the mouth, hand, eyes, and cone. I began painting the background where there weren't any circles a light orange, then painted the floating circles different colors, and lastly the person and ice cream cone. Originally, I was going to have a whole head and shoulders holding the ice cream cone, but after laying all the circles down on the canvas, I decided the idea of just having a floating face and hand was more interesting to me. I also was planning on painting each circle a different color, but as I painted, I decided that having repeating colors would bring more unity to the project. As time went on, I felt that it was taking me too long to mix new colors and paint each circle which resulted in me leaving a few white. I ended up liking this because it draws your eye to different areas of the painting, rather than all of the colors just melting together. My next steps for this project would be to mix white with yellow and repaint the ring around the ice cream scoop so that my writing from where I planned out the painting would be covered.