Midterm (Final)

At the beginning of the midterm period, we were each given a page with a bunch of circles on it. We were then given the whole hour and a half to create something out of them. They could be cut out or stay on the page; we could use any material we wanted. The subject of my creation is an octopus tentacle and in it's suckers are glimpses of different worlds or "realms". On the side are the words "we are all part of something bigger than ourselves. with splattered paint in the background. First, I started out with sketching each world on the circle with pencil. Since each one was so small, I didn't put a lot of detail into them, but I tried to make them look impressionistic, with a lot of pencil strokes. Then I cut them out and drew the outline of the tentacle and shrunk some of them down to fit. Then I glued them on and did the pinkish color of the tentacle first, so I could layer darks on top. I added purples and reds to make the different parts stand out and to do the shading. Next I went onto google fonts and typed in the sentence I wanted into it and found a font that I liked and copied it onto the paper. I thought the background was too white, so I added the splatter paint.

I used color and value to make different parts of the tentacle stand out so it would emphasize different parts. I used balance in the background so it wouldn't take away from the subject. I used pattern in the circles on the tentacle. I was originally going to have an old man sitting on the ground with a bunch of the "realm" bubbles floating around him with the same quote to make it seem like he was the one who thought of them and that we're just in our own little universe but we don't realize there's so much around us that we don't know about or can't see. But I liked the tentacle idea better, so I did that.

I thought it would be cool to have all of the worlds in the tentacle of a giant octopus because who knows, maybe our world is sitting inside an octopus? It was thought provoking and it was fun to do, so I decided to stick with it. I'm proudest of how the layering came out with the watercolor. I like to use watercolor but I'm not that good at it so I thought this project came out decent because there's so many different colors ranging from light to dark. I left the landscapes in the circles black and white because I thought it would draw attention to them. I struggled in making the circles fit; I didn't use all of them because I would have to cut them down to be tiny so that you wouldn't even be able to see the scene inside it. In the end, I just didn't use a few of them (the ones I didn't like). If I could make this piece stronger, I would erase the graphite lines so that you couldn't see them through the watercolor and neaten up the watercolor lines.