Space

Artist Statement

For my final piece I collected five leaves and arranged them in such a way to create six or so negative spaces. I really liked creating this piece because I got to have a lot more fun with it, I didn't have to spend the time trying to get all the details of the leaves right, I just needed to get the shapes between the leaves. I also found it quite relaxing to fill in the negative space with all these zentangle inspired designs. My favorite space to fill was the lower center space where I drew the mushrooms. I originally was planning to draw a fairy on top of the center mushroom to add a little fantasy element to the piece, but I decided to do a swirl design. I think that the swirls do bring somewhat of a magic feel to the pice without straying too far from the original zentangle concept.

I drew this specific piece on bristol board. The materials I used to create this piece are a black fine tip pen, graphite, and watercolors. I mostly used pen to outline and draw the patterns and designs and used pencil to shade in a few designs. When creating this piece I taped off a few sections to work in later. I knew that I wanted to do something that would contrast the designs in the other negative space around it. I had a few different ideas on how I wanted to fill in those lines, but in the end I decided to use watercolor and do a rainbow fade of colors. I think that the watercolors lines certainly pop and draws the eye to follow them and was a good way to 'jazz' up the piece.

Like I mentioned before I collected five leaves and arranged them to create six negative spaces. I then proceeded to draw the negative spaces between the leaves. When I first was first visualizing this piece, the only thing I had planned out was that I knew I wanted to fill the background with zentangle designs, the rest came to me while I was physically working on the piece. It was I finished some of my designs, that I wanted to add something else to the piece and that's when I started to tape off sections. Over all I'm pretty satisfied with this piece, I think that if i wanted to evolve this piece I could possibly add some color to some of the zentangle designs just to draw the viewer's eye towards a few of them, such as the one on the top to the left.