WhatchamaDRAWit

DINNER PARTY

SEP. 8, 2017 — acrylic and pen on watercolor paper

In this project, we were given two random prompts. We had to choose one and make a drawing out of it.

I got the prompt of drawing a fish with glasses and a bushy mustache, which I decided to do because it sounded fun. In my original sketch, I was thinking of doing something like a fancy victorian portrait, except the guy in the portrait would have a fish head. I changed my mind, then, because that was too much work for the time I had, and I instead decided to scale down the drawing so that I wouldn't have as much white space. To begin with, I sketched out the general composition, and then I painted the background and fish tail on. For the arms and head, I drew those on a separate piece of paper, cut them out, and glued them onto the tail—I only had hot glue, though, so I had to make do. After it was all cut and glued and painted, and cut it down from the bigger piece of paper that it was a part of, choosing to let the tail hang off the edge in order to achieve a sort of 3D feeling.

This was a fun project. I liked the prompt that I got, and I liked how my fish turned out in the end. Although the background is simple, I think that the black provides nice contrast with the relatively lighter colors of the fish, and that the white dots that I added make it feel less empty. I'm also glad that the finished piece feels like it's tied together—after I first "finished," I felt that the fish was lacking something, and so I went back and added some designs to the head, and some more details to the tail and arms. I feel that this additional pattern added something necessary to the painting. I'm also glad that I thought of letting the fish tail hang off the page, because I think that it would've been boring without it. In the end, this was a fun project, and I'm pleased with the result.