Donate Life

Donate Life

Watercolor

9x12

Artist Statement

For this assignment, we were given the prompt of creating art that promoted organ and tissue donation. I chose to paint a human heart teaming with life, showing the beauty and possibility of organ donation provides. Around the heart, I put the words “Organ and tissue donation is to donate life”. While I wanted to stay away from the gruesome, exposed muscle look, I really wanted to incorporate the anatomy of an actual human heart. I’ve always been fascinated with the heart’s shape, function, and symbolic meaning so I enjoyed painting it for the first time. Watercolor is also my favorite medium to work with, and I tend to like those pieces the best.

I started by using HB graphite pencil to sketch the shape of the heart and flowers onto my paper. I then used watercolors to fill in the shapes, erasing the pencil lines just before I painted over them (because with watercolors, they’ll oftentimes show through). As a final step for the watercolor, I put painter’s tape over the 1-inch border and filled in the background with a light teal. I then photographed the painting with my phone and transferred it to my laptop. Using a picture I took of my own handwriting spelling out the words, I imposed the message onto the picture of the watercolor in photoshop.

When thinking over the prompt, I considered a few different directions I could go in for this piece. It looked like many of the past winners had steered clear of including the organs themselves, and had gone instead with an uplifting message. While I definitely wanted to keep the piece hopeful and uplifting, I really wanted to include an actual depiction of a heart. When considering my thumbnail sketches, that is the direction I ended up going in. I don’t see this organ as gruesome and bloody but as something beautiful and full of possibility. I did my best to depict it this way in my composition. Additionally, I also experimented some with materials. My original thought was to make the entire drawing with a thin black pen and be very detailed. In the end, I decided that colorful watercolors would better fit the feel I was going for, and a full teal background to contrast the heart and balance the space. My next steps would be to hopefully transfer the image onto a bigger canvas or find a better way to make the background blue smoother.