Donate Life

Artist Statement

The main idea that guided this work was coming up with a slogan for organ and tissue donation. I am going to Ireland in a couple of weeks so that has been on my mind a lot so was thinking about a way to incorporate that into my drawing. 4 leaf clovers are big in Ireland and I decided I was going to base my slogan around that. Unfortunately, I did paint this at like 3 in the morning and did not realize I only painted a 3-leaf clover, not a 4-leaf clover. With this piece, I was trying to figure out how to make the main subject of the painting the clover while still incorporating an interesting background. To do this I made the background more abstract instead of realistic to put the main focus on the detailed clover.

This work was made with acrylic paint on watercolor paper. I first used a pencil to sketch it out and then went over it with acrylics. I used mostly blue acrylics for the background but made different shades of blue by mixing with black or white or both. I did the same with the green but for some shaded green, I mixed it with brown or blue to get specific colors. I used white and yellow around the very edge of the clover to show highlights.

For this piece I didn't do any research however I did use a reference photo of (what the time I thought was a 4 leaf clover but now realize was only a 3 leaf) clover. I chose to use blue as my background because I wanted it to kind of show a sky behind the clover. I was inspired by vincent Van Gogh's starry night in the way he swirls the sky. I experimented a lot with the different shaded colors for the leaves. You can see that the darker leaves are in front of the lighter part of the background and the lighter leaves are in front of the darker bits of the background.