Myths were created as a way of teaching explanations for things that no one was capable of explaining. This is why so many myths are about creation or death, two great unknowns that are hard to explain even now. However, with the rise of science, many myths lost footing and became obsolete and inapplicable to society, which is the idea that I used for this piece. To illustrate this idea, I decided to show Eve in the garden of Eden looking into a mirror. Instead of seeing herself, she sees the alternate version of the past- a prehistoric sea. It spills out of the mirror to show how scientific views commonly overpower mythological views, but it's left up to the viewer to decide if Eve will withstand the battery of the ocean, or whether its volume will be too great for her to survive.
For this, I had to mostly try to work with mistakes that I made, since you can't paint over watercolor, but I also had to try to use new techniques. Some techniques I used were doing lots of layering watercolor on the hair, doing blending on the sea animals by adding dark splotches while they were wet, using a rough sponge to create the texture on the vegetation behind Eve, and using masking to protect her skin from becoming green. However, some of the green leaked into the mirror, so I had to turn that into a "happy little mistake" by turning it into a bunch of seaweed, which actually accentuated the movement of the water and showed its force better. Another mistake I made was the coloration of the sea creature on the left; as you can see, part of the right one is underwater and paler where it's under the water, and the entirety of the left one was suuposed to be underwater. Unfortunately, I forgot to make it the right shade, but luckily it seems to read about as well. Overall, I think this turned out well, though if I could go back in time and do some things differently, I would use rubber cement to create light foam on the water spilling out and I would have painted Eve's legs on wet paper to get the wet-on-wet look, and I also would have made some parts of the painting darker to offset her hair.
No comments:
Post a Comment