Sustained Investigation IV

For this assignment, we were asked to create a third piece that represented our inquiry question. For this project, I wanted to portray schizophrenia and the struggles/stigmas around that mental illness. By looking at my work, you can see a girl in the jungle with a bunch of pairs of eyes hidden throughout the tree and leaves. The story behind this piece is a girl who struggles with hallucinations and delusions. The sets of eyes represent those hallucinations and the dark, empty jungles represents how she feels lonely but not alone. This project relates to my life because I have seen people that I've grown up knowing struggle with this illness, and they have explained their experiences to me. I chose to make this piece very figurative and symbolic because schizophrenia is very stigmatized so I wanted to make something beautiful that also conveyed the message.

The majority of this project was made with watercolor paints, but the eyes were painted using acrylic.

To create this piece, I started by sketching out the portrait. I used the layering technique to build color, highlights, and shadows to make the portrait look proportionate and realistic. I would paint a layer with one color, let it dry, then go in with a second color where it was needed and repeat. My project evolved quite a bit because I originally wanted to do one prominent portrait, with many miniature portraits around it. But when I finished my first portrait, my vision changed and I thought she looked very bohemian, so I thought a jungle background was more fitting. Plus, I was still able to convey my message. My next steps could be adding details to the portrait using acrylic so I could have smaller highlights and shadows, which would make it more realistic.