SEPTEMBER 12, 2016

In this project, our assignment was to take a piece of paper (which has a splotch of ink on it) and turn it into something. The aim was to teach us how to problem solve creatively.

To start off with, I looked at the ink splotch from many different angles. At first, I considered turning it into some sort of monster-man walking across a street with a city as the background, because that was the first thing that popped into mind. But then I realized that it actually kind of looked like a fish... and so I started sketching out a couple fish. I drew the small one first, since that was easiest, and I then moved onto the big one, which took a bit more time. I also decided to add a speech bubble, since I knew that I wanted to fill up the empty space in some way. After this was all sketched out, i went over the lines with ink, and then started painting. I began with the water, because I knew that I wanted to get that right first, and I thought it would be the most difficult. However, it turned out to be rather easy, and thus I continued painting diving right in (no pun intended) to start painting the big fish. This actually look longer than I had anticipated, because i found that I could actually make some interesting details that looked vaguely like scales, but to do so I had to wait for one layer of paint to dry before I did the next one. It wasn't too bad, though, and I eventually finished up by filling in the mouth and the scales on the fish's back. Lastly I filled in the small fish, and decided that I wanted to keep the speech bubble simple. So, I filled it with a big "Hello".

I'm sort of proud of this piece. I feel like, for one, it represents the style that I have, art-wise—sure it's not a fully developed style, but I might be getting there. Furthermore, I think that I made an okay use of space. Personally I enjoy having one image centered on the paper, without anything to distract from it; but I also know that that's not considered to be very good, so I made an effort to create an interesting composition, which I hope I did well. I also like the texture that I managed to create, such as in the shading of the water, and in the scales and shading on the larger fish. I'm especially proud because I haven't really worked with watercolors before (at least, not since elementary school) and so for me to be able to use them at all was a triumph for me. All in all, I rather like this.