Beautiful Oops

Reflection

Abundance of Dragons was inspired by an inkblot on a blank piece of watercolor paper. I saw a dragon's head in the inkblot, which led to a quick watercolor painting of a dragon that didn't look great. I was feeling overwhelmed with creating something amazing, in so little time. After trying to think about what I was going to do to fix it, I remembered that there is an element of craft/creating that was missing from how I was making it. So I made a bold move, which I will explain further in a moment, and changed the piece completely. Now that it is "finished," I feel proud of the outcome. I put finished in quotation marks because while this is technically completed, I still feel that I could make changes with it to make it better. While I was nearing the end of making it, a family member looked at it and noticed a different dragon, than the one I had seen. This is how it got its title. One of my favorite things about art is that often what one person sees is not the same thing as what the artist or another person sees. While I may see a dragon with a black head, a brown spine, and a large golden, purple wing; someone else may see something completely different.

For this piece, I used two pieces of watercolor paper, watercolor paint, and the original India inkblot. The piece of watercolor paper that is the background is 11" by 15" and on top, there are smaller pieces of watercolor paper that were cut out of a 9" by 12" sheet. These pieces include the two large ovals and all of the differently colored slivers. I watercolored over everything on the page, including the inkblot.

Starting this project I had a very clear idea in my head of what it would look like. In the end, my page had gotten larger by about 3" and I had a semi 3-dimensional work, which still included my inkblot. To explain, once I had watercolored a dragon on the original sheet of paper, it didn't look right. So I decided to cut up the painting, following the same curves that I had made on the page with paint, and make colorful slivers of paper, a little like wings. I also cut out two ovals from the page, and those became the balancing points for my work. Then, I needed somewhere to rearrange these pieces onto, so I took my extra paint, and I painted a background. As I was painting I moved my brush up and down quickly, creating the interesting effect that you can see in the background. I was fascinated by the way that paint reacted to water, so I played around with that a lot too. In the end, I glued the pieces on, creating wings, for what was originally one dragon. But of course in art, things often don't go to plan, so my one dragon turned into two dragons. One with the inkblot head, and another with a green head. In a way, this work was not the product of one, but instead many, beautiful oops's.