Sustained Investigation #2

Title: Honey, come back

Size: 10.5''x7.5''

Statement:

This piece shows a young woman laughing in the midst of honey. She’s lifting one of her arms up to take a taste of honey from the honeycomb around her. I used a friend as my model for the female in the piece and I chose to surround her with honey because the model loves honey.

I used chalk pastel for the first layer of the image as well as the background. I then used oil pastels to strengthen the depth of the walls of the honeycomb. For the detail on the female figure and the honey drops, I used colored pencil. This is all done on sturdy watercolor paper.

For my process, I first started by sketching out the woman on sketch paper. I liked how it came out, so I used tracing paper to copy it over onto the watercolor paper. When added color to the traced in sketch, the lines stayed white which I wasn’t expecting. However I kept them there and they helped to highlight the form of the body. I then decided to put honey behind her and have it dripping around her. Throughout history, honey has been seen as sweet and heavenly, therefore I thought it was appropriate to associate this with the figures sexuality. I decided to color in the background black to emphasize the honey and fill up the space around it. The black background also mirrored the black/brown hair of the figure.

For my next steps I would clean up the edges of the honeycomb and continue to add highlights.