Creation Prompt

Prompted by a page full of circles, I created an ocean scene with the circles becoming plastic rings used for holding soda cans, so it appears as though you are looking at the ocean life through this piece of garbage floating in the water. I was inspired to create this because the health of our ocean is a very important thing to me and the amount of plastic filling our seas is disturbing.

For this project I used graphite to sketch out my design, then used watercolor paints to bring it to life.

I began this project by holding the paper of circles away from me and formulating ideas in my head of what I could transform the array into. I liked the idea of having the circles be negative space, or space where you could see through the foreground into the background. The image of a six pack ring came to my mind and I was immediately inspired to create and environmental health awareness piece showing plastic pollution in our oceans. I added lines in between and around the circles to create the plastic rings, then got started on sketching out the ocean scene in the background. Because I chose to use the space in the circles to be where the background showed through, I wanted to add something into each one to create balance and unity in the piece, but also didn't want to take away from the main subject of the piece— the plastic rings. When painting the blue background, I used soft even strokes to capture the movement of water whereas I used clean, hard lines to show the texture of the rocks. I repeated the same species of coral in the background to create pattern therefore promoting unity in the piece as well. As my project evolved, I became more comfortable painting with watercolors— a medium I don't use much at all— and became more confident in being able to create value throughout the piece. My next steps for this project could be to add more sea life in the background to emphasize the vast amount of organisms that are being affected by plastic pollution.