Sustained Investigation #11

This drawing was inspired by the phrase "the apple of my eye." The design I came up with was and apple covered in eyes inside of a larger eye. I did this because the first thing I thought of when sketching ideas was an apple covered in eyes. Then I expanded on that idea by putting it inside a larger eye. The whole concept was kind of strange looking but I liked it so I emphasized the strangeness by adding some blue and red lines in an around the eye because those are the colors of 3D things. I also just used a bunch of different colors for the skin and messy lines to go with the style of the drawing.

I don't usually draw in this style so I wanted to test the colors digitally first before I used paint because it is easier to undo anything I don't like with digital art. I ended up creating a finished digital drawing and really liking the result. Unfortunately, since I thought I was just doing a quick color test, the resolution I chose for the canvas was really bad. This caused it to be pretty blurry looking when I printed it out. I had originally planned to draw it on a smaller sheet of paper so I printed it out smaller which helped make it slightly clearer. I still wasn't very happy with it so I used a very thin black pen to go over all the lines to make the details show up on the printed version. I also added some extra lines and details that weren't on the digital version. I also used a white gel pen for the highlights and the leaves in the background. This made the leaves stand out a lot more so I am happy I added the white lines. Going over the lines with black pen was part of my original idea when I thought I was going to used traditional art materials. I was going to use colored pencil and gouache and then draw on top of it with a fine point pen.

This piece is pretty balanced and symmetrical with some slight differences on each side in the leaves and the eyes. I used space by adding the leaves on the plain black background to fill the space but not take the focus off of the eye. After I changed my inquiry question I wanted to try out different perspectives and so far they have been of people that are further away so for this one I decided to try a close up. The use of color on the skin added some texture. The lines around the apple in the eye make a pattern and add more color. I made the eyelashes on the smaller eyes and the one big eye pretty similar to create unity between them. My project evolved as I decided which materials to use and added more details like the leaves to make good use of space. My next steps could be to try using darker colors like this more as well as light colors so the contrast makes the subjects of my drawings stand out.