Elements and Principles of Design

Pig

Chicken

For this project we had to create a diptych inspired by the elements and principles of design. I wanted to incorporate farm animals into my design to help show elements and principles that I chose and to help connect the two images. For the first one I chose to do a pig with the front half representing line and movement and the second half representing color and value. I chose to do a pig because I really enjoy farm animals and wanted to keep going with a theme. For the second piece I wanted to do another farm animal. So I chose to do a chicken, again with half on one side and half on the other. For the head end I wanted to play with texture and value so I used a fine point pen to stipple in texture and to add shadows. On the outside of the chicken head I chose to do pattern and color. For the end half of the chicken I wanted to keep using the pen so I chose to go with the idea of movement, that the little lines in the chicken butt are helping to move your eyes across the page which also deals with lines which is the second aspect I chose to add to my diptych.

I started working on the pig image first and I began by drawing out a pig and mapping out where each thing was going to go. Originally I was going to do shape in the second half of the pig and have the shapes build up the form of the back half. I began to do this with oil pastels but about half way through I realized that the Bristol Board that I was using had no texture so the pastels just kinda mushed around and looked weird. So I abandoned that idea and moved on to the pigs body, I started by using colored pencils. Once I had the shapes filled in with all different colors I looked back and still didn't like it. The background was uneven and clashed with the foreground and I just wasn't loving it. I tried to fix it by adding shading to the shapes and more layers in the background but it just wasn't working. So I started on the second half of the pig. I drew the head using a ball point pen and made it one constant line and then for the background just drew one line. After I had the pig and lines in the back outlined I used water color to help fill the white space in the pig. Originally I wanted to leave the lines in the background just lines but I felt that it was to light so I went in and added some dark water colors. Once that side was done I went back to the side that I really didn't like, I couldn't figure out what I didn't like so I decided to start over, but artists work in layers so I used acrylic paint to cover over the background and begin again. I used acrylic paint to help show color and value on the second half of the pig by using shading and colors.

For the second piece I started by using Bristol board again and just outline my chicken with pencil. Then I began to stipple using a fine point pen, I started with the chickens head because thats were I wanted most of the focus to be and where I felt that I could emphasize the most texture and shading. Then I began to work down the chickens neck adding minimal marks because I didn't want the body to be darker than the head. I then continued by adding a pattern that followed the flow of the chickens head. Once this was down I went in with water colors to add color. I chose to use the yellow because he paper had some smudges of yellow already on it so I thought it would help cover that up. Then I added the black to help darken the overall color of the image. For the second half of the chicken I used a fine point pen to cross hatch the body of the chicken and then to use lines to create the tree in the background. I like the tree because it uses different variety of line thicknesses and helps to give the tree texture and shadows. After this was done I went in again with colored pencil and added colors to help take up the white space.

Overall I enjoyed this project, I was stretched as an artist to only use one piece of paper and work with layers which is something that I struggle with, I think that if I were to do this again I would focus more on really making the elements and principles of design as clear as they can be, along with spending more time on the small details. I really liked the idea of the chicken but felt rushed with the background and I wish I had taken more time to make it clearer because it was an idea I really liked and enjoyed.