Artist Statement

I honestly don't know how I came up with the idea to turn these blind contours into a tree, I think it may have been the face which is now the tree trunk. After I decided that I wanted to make a tree, the story behind this piece started to set in. It is based on Shel Silverstein's children's book, The Giving Tree. In the book the tree spends it whole life giving to satisfy others, no matter how much it negatively influenced him. In my piece, someone is picking all the trees fruit and he feels as though he is being robbed of all his value. I tried to annunciate those feelings by adding some tears to his eyes and leaving the iris's of his eyes blank to give them a more hollow feel.

For this piece I used a black pen to create the blind contours so there was no erasing which is a little stress full. But as Bob Ross would say 'there are no mistakes, just happy accidents." I decided to use watercolors to add color to my piece, unfortunately I didn't plan ahead when doing this project and I didnt use watercolor paper so I couldn't use the paints to their fullest potential. I would of liked to be able to layer more colors and paint to give the tree a little more texture, but if I added a lot of water to the paper, the paper would start to break apart.

This piece was created by three different blind contours. A blind contour is a drawing where you only look at the object you are drawing and never look down at your work until after you finish. I would have to say my favorite part about creating this piece was seeing the blind contours for the first time. It was definitely a strange experience because my drawings didn't look at all what I picture them to look like, but it was intriguing to see your art after the time was up. I think that my least favorite part about this project was resisting the urge to look at my paper, it was more difficult than I thought it would be. It was also difficult to settle on a single idea for this piece especially if you have a few in mind that you really want to see come together. I think if I tried to do this again I would probably want to change what I was making, and stretch my imagination even more. I think that the biggest thing I took away from creating this piece is to pay attention to all the details of what you are drawing. When we spent the whole time focused on what we were drawing I started to notice more details and shapes than I probably would have noticed if my eyes kept looking from the object to my paper.