Final triptych: ‘congested, togetherness, loneliness’

Final triptychs: ‘threat, bravery, safety’

Practice digital anatomy sketches:

Prep work for final pieces:

I decided to move onto digital studies and trying out different marks with different tools on procreate that I thought would suit the piece’s best and colour pallets as I wanted the pieces to be semi-realistic but still have that ‘sketchy’ aesthetic to them, so that the symbolism would easier to read and interpret from the viewer’s perspective. 

Reference photo for the bedroom:

Research on poisonous plants and how i plan on incorporating that within this project to convey the words ‘threat, bravery and safety’ metaphorically :

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2020/07/uk-poisonous-plants/

Digital practice print before lino printing :

Research on dreams:

The rearch on plants reminded me of a nightmare i had which related to plants and therefore since this occurance I’ve wanted t explore this idea of the sleeping environment, dreams and plants as well to incorporating that within this project to convey the words ‘threat, bravery and safety’ metaphorically as see if it fits well on conveing that message.

First,I started with looking through my dream journal which I’ve kept since around 2015 as a very vivid dreamer myself i love looking back at all the crazy dreams and nightmares i have as sometimes they reoccure and i enjoy looking into why our brain does this kind of thing when we’re asleep.

Research on sleeping next to spmeone:

The only time that i could think of when I wouldn’t often get nightmares or dreams at all and felt safe enough to fall sleep faster even, was when i?d have another person sleeping next to me. More specifically when i knew or was close with that person. So I decided to look into why that might be the case.

Research links:

10 Benefits of Sleeping next to Someone You Love

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/do-people-sleep-better-with-a-partner

https://www.leesa.com/article/benefits-of-sharing-a-bed-with-someone

Further food stamping experimentation process:

Pre-scanned work:

Materials used :

80g print paper, smooth.

Acrylic paint in the colours: aqcuamarine blue and green.

I decided to add paint on top of the fruit isndtead as some fruits in this cse the pear and lemon don’t have very vibrant natural fruit juice so the stamping process wouln’t have worked as well as it did with the starwbrerries.

Scanned-in work:

I really enjoyed this from of process and creating hoewver I wanted to trey and do it on different coloured backgrounds go see if it would have a more put-togetehr outlook instead of looking as random fruit stamps floating around. Although I do still love the unnique patterns i was able to achive as each stamp has its own opacity and original texture.

Further experiments:

I wasn’t too pleased with these prints as maybe they drifted away from my initial idea of conveying congestion with food as this display is too structured and not as explicit to potray a metaphorical messege of ‘congestion’ in my opinion.

In order to achieve this I used : Acrylic paint, aquamarine blue and black. Also, used 160g card paper which was quite smooth and therefore the paint transferred quite well from the fruit.

Practicing anatomy for the final triptychs :

I’d been practicing anatomy mostly outside of this projects but I’m at the stage where I feel ready to progress into the step of making thumnails for my final tiptychs and just beforehand I wanted to practice my anatomy to see what poses i liked best which would fit the ideas I had in mind.

Non related (practice) work to project :

Thumbnail sketches (prep work) :

Closeups of sketches:

Further reserch on the ‘togetherness’ word using the space of the ‘kitchen’ :

More digital sketching experiments (focusing more on what type of food and the compositions of it and kitchens) :

I began by sketching these kitchen structes very blotch-like and not too attentive to detail but more on compostition and perspective as well as colour tones and shades and seeing what I liked better. I took my references from various 3D home building websites for the only sake that I wasn’t managing my time too well at this point in the project and therefore wasn’t able to conduct my own references.

I also experimented with background colours other than plain white and found it pulled the whole ambiance together. However it was around this point that I realised that constructing a whole kitchen as a possible outcome further wouldn’t quite fit within what I wanted to achieve in portraying a sense of the word ‘togetherness’ since these kitchens weren’t familiar to me and felt empty and impersonal. Therefore, i decided to shift my focus onto looking more closely into the setting, still of a kitchen, like in the digital study below.

Plant studies:

Digital experimental sketches :

While experimenting with digital art i found I really like the type of style i used in procreate as the brush strokes I used remnd me of a technique you wuld use when traditionally painting.

This quick kitchen digital sketch inspired me about the time I used to live at home and we would always cook together as a family yet now as i live with flatmates who all eat at different times than me it can get a little lonely cooking just by myself and then also eating alone everyday . So I belive an llustartion of a kitchen would be a good representation of a space which has become something i associate with ‘loneliness’.

Digital experiment sketch of a cheese cake :

Primary references, resources and artist research :

I took inspiration from James Jean and took the time to create loose observational drawings using ink on a A1 sheet of paper (like he did) and found that it was really helpful in making me less focused on detail and more on the actual figure proportions i was observing which i happened to mtake from one of Michel Lauricella’s books of ‘Fat and skin folds’ Morpho series.

I decided to take a photo of something i’d cooked to represent the ‘congested’ word metaphorically because i think it fits well with what I had in mind when it comes to being ‘lonely’ while doing food shopping yet putting all the food that is just for me into a fridge which I share ‘together’ with three others of my flatmates.

I proceeded to make a collage of it at first to experiment with the layered effect it would give off contributing to the ‘congestion’ of it and all.

Time laps

In this 1h study of a food basket I used acrylic paint for its fast drying purposes as i knew from the beginning i was going to create a layered piece of work. I’m not too pleased with how the end result ended up looking as I’m not very fluent in this type of blotchy art style, although it made me realise i really like working with big brush strokes like in my digital pieces. As I really like ths kind of close up composition of the food basket representing the lonely experience of grocery shopping at uni, I want to carry on in this direction during this project.

More artist research :

I’d been experimenting with some fruit photos and decided to try and actually stamp the fruit itself and see if i’d be able to get any sort of reflection. I was supried at how much I was actually bable to get from just vone strawberry and the uiqueness of each stamp and the texture that I want to experiment with more and other foods in this technique.