Beautiful Oops

This piece was more of a farce than a dedicated piece of artwork. It depicts our current president, Donald Trump, floating in the bath, watching Fox News with three beer cans on the ground. The colors of the American flag are echoed from the flag in the window to the bathmat and to the colors on the TV. This was done intentionally, as many on the republican side (our president very much included) call themselves 'pro-america' and promote nationalistic ideas, using the American Flag as their symbol. Some thought should also be given to the fact that the bathmat is an american flag. This is because it feels as though, through the tariffs, denial of COVID-19 being a threat, and awful supreme court justice appointees it feels as though Donald is wiping his feet (and perhaps something else) with American.

For this assignment we were each given a piece of paper with an inkblot on it. After some spinning around and a bit of thinking, I decided that one piece of the inkblot looked like the head of our president, and the other piece rather like a leg. It was decided, I would draw Trump in the bath. To start, I sketched with my trusty 2B graphite pencil, and then smacked a bit of ink on there using .005, .08, and .05 micron pens. To add some color, I used Prismacolor colored pencils.

This piece evolved slowly, first from a full on political cartoon, to more of a slight commentary. At first, Donald was flying downhill in his bath, headed towards a pit labeled 'fascism' with a chalked-out body labeled the 'american people' laying behind. While I still think this idea was better, I was frustrated with the technical rendering, and chose instead to put Donald in a minimalist scene in his bathroom.