Sustained Investigation # 12

This artwork was inspired by the phrase "heard it through the grapevine." After trying a bunch of designs including portraits of people and phones made of grapevine, I decided on this one which is simpler than the other ideas. The way that people are included is through the ears and then I just created this pattern of grapevines going into the ears.

The materials I used were watercolor and pen on watercolor paper. I did this because watercolors are good for building up colors on fruit the create highlights and shadows. I went over it with pen to darken the lines and because I like the way the two materials look together. I also used a blue colored pencil for the pattern in the background.

I experimented with the colors on the grapes as I add layers of paint by adding some yellow to the highlights and mixing more red into the purple. The yellow ended up being too light and didn't show up so in future projects I want to experiments with color combinations like that and make them more obvious. I used pattern in this piece by repeating the grapevines and doing the blue pattern in the background to fill the negative space. There is emphasis on the grapes because they are the darkest and most colorful part of the painting. I used the pen for the lines because it add contrast between the black and the lighter colors I used. When I was painting the grapes I started with lighter values of purple and then put the darker values on top. My project evolved as I tested out different color combinations after I did the first sketch but after that I didn't make many changes while I worked on it. I think the colors I used were a bit too light so the next steps I could take could be to use darker and more saturated colors in future pieces. I could do this by painting with something other than watercolors because it's difficult to get solid dark colors with watercolors.