Midterm Circles

Holy

9 x 12

Watercolor, Colored Pencil, and Ink on Watercolor Paper

This piece was created for the midterm circles prompt, where we were given a blank sheet with a 4 x 4 grid of circles and tasked with incorporating these circles into a finished work. I was inspired by a doodle I had made in my calculus notebook that showed two faces merging. I chose to use the circles as part of the background, and as a way to splice color to make the work more vivid and varied. I settled on a warm color scheme for the faces and their "halos" because I was inspired by Christian iconography, a reference to my first circle project earlier this semester.

I began by drawing the faces with graphite, and then tracing over these lines with an ink pen. I then created the rest of the lines in the composition with ink. The colors were a hybrid of colored pencil and watercolor paint: I would shade an area with colored pencil and then paint over the area with watercolor. I began adding color to the halos and faces, working outward in a gradient. My finishing touch was to go over certain circles with the thick ink pen.

Going into this project I was quite unsure about the end result. The circles eventually became boundaries for color, an effect I did not anticipate. I also added halos to the faces to create more of a religious look. I settled on the combination of pencil and watercolor because of the more varied and solid colors it produced. In the end, I would have liked to have done some things differently if I had had more time, but I am satisfied with the end result.