Mechanical Paradox

RING AROUND THE ROSIE

JAN. 3, 2017 — pen and acrylic on watercolor

This project was another segment of our concentration series. This time, though, we focused on a mechanical paradox—something mechanical paired with something organic.

I had a pretty different idea at the beginning. I wanted to do another full-page piece like I had with the alley one, except this time in a forest. I sketched out a broken robot on a forest floor with pencil, and then I went over all of those lines with pen. However, when I started to go over it all with paint, things didn't work out how I wanted. I was having a difficult time getting the shading right, and the paint was streaky and drying before I wanted it to. Finally, I called it quits and decided to start over. I chose to use a smaller piece of paper this time (for my sanity's sake) and I sketched out a robot that looked similar to the first one. I also made the choice to keep the colors more simple this time. I didn't have any desire whatsoever to go into complicated texture and shading and so I kept with red, black, and white—a color combination which I've recently discovered that I like. I made the background solid black with some red and white details and I used some red pen to accentuate some details on the robot.

This wasn't the worst project I've done, so that's nice. I definitely liked my original idea more, but I wasn't really in the right state to be doing something like that (sometimes you just gotta be in the right mood for detailed work). I do like the way that my colors turned out in my final piece because I like the contrast between them. I also kind of like the fact that it's more clean than my other project would have been and that the paint isn't streaky. Plus, the lack of other large aspects to the piece allows the viewer to focus on the robot.