My first inspirations came from Greek mythology. I wanted to incorporate one of my favorite culture's and some of my favorite mythology into the piece. In Greek mythology Thanatos, the god of death, is chained up by Sisyphus after Sisyphus attempts to cheat death and outsmart Thanatos. Thanatos was sent after Sisyphus because Sisyphus was a thief and had eluded his death several times. Sisyphus asked Thanatos to demonstrate how the chains would work on him and then chained up Thanatos. I took my interpretation of this, being the fear of death and the desire to elude death, and implemented it into my piece.
There is an anonymous quote that iv'e always thought a lot about. "Life asked Death,'Death, why does everyone love me, but hate you?' Death replied,'Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth." I think the quote is something that I gravitate to and is interesting to me because something that seems beautiful can end up being ugly and painful, the opposite can be found in something that seems ugly. After combining this quote and the dance between Sisyphus and Thanatos, I knew that I wanted my opposing concepts to be: a beautiful lie and a painful truth. I developed the concept of representing a myth between a villain portrayed as an admirable character in a pleasant world and an admirable character portrayed as a villain in a gloomy world, all in an hourglass as to signify the ending of an illusion and the impending punishment that Sisyphus faced. |
I did my planning sketches and final sketch all digitally. I wanted to have a highly detailed, colored, revised version of the project I was improving this from. I started by making a perfectly symmetrical hourglass shape and frame. I then filled in the hourglass with my two scenes in a considerable amount of detail in a rougher sketch style. The frame I used an airbrush and blending tool to colorize blending burnt sienna with a darker brown. In my final piece my hourglass will be split down the middle horizontally and each half will be placed on a canvas. I decided to sketch my hourglass as one whole piece so I could make sure that the image worked well cohesively and then I later split it up into it's two halves. I will add much more detail into the tree and piles of skulls with the gouache medium I am using in the final product.
I was given a lot of feedback on my original concepts for this idea and I feel as I successfully integrated them to improve the artwork. I was told that the final piece should zoom out from the hourglass as to further solidify to the viewer that an hourglass is in fact what they are looking at. I changed the canopy of the tree to take up the entire top of the hourglass as opposed to a small section of tree floating in the middle of the hourglass. This helped make the scene seem more full and brought much more focus to my characters. I made sure to add more detail to my character and his scene in the bottom in my final piece and in the sketch. I needed it to be apparent that my character representing my gloomy world, was in fact holding an hourglass.
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Before this project I had never worked with Gouache paint. I wanted to test the medium first and I also did some research into the medium and into how it behaves. I found that Gouache is a very thick paint that can be spread a great deal. A little bit of paint can be spread to cover a large area. I also found out that Gouache is very easily layered. I used layering a lot during the painting process. Gouache behaves very similarly to water color. It dries extremely quick but can be "re-activated" with water in order to reuse a palette or rework a certain section of a painting. Gouache and water color have very similar blending properties as well. Gouache can be watered down, thinned and spread. My favorite part of Gouache is how pigmented and rich it is. The color is very intense and it is very good at covering and blending. The paint applies very smoothly and dries in a very nice matte finish. Every color in my Gouache palette expect for Lemon Yellow and White very easily covered my graphite sketches. I used Burnt Sienna the most throughout my painting and it as well as all of the other colors can be transparent and light in color if applied lightly but also very rich and dark if applied thick and in a couple of coats. Since Gouache dries so quickly, layering and going over areas took very little to no time at all.
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The painting process and the final product I was getting was one that improved very greatly over time. I had to get used to the paint seeing at is was very different from acrylic or oil paints. My experience with watercolor paints helped a lot in the painting process. The biggest technique I developed was blending. I had to use a lot of blending in the first painting, mainly in the tree trunk and it's leaves. I used much more layering and solid color application in the second painting while illustrating the piles of skulls or any skull in general. Blending did however play a very big role in both pieces and was one of the biggest challenges starting the painting.
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Perhaps the biggest challenge I faced was trying to apply paint in a smooth fashion to an area where I wanted no blemishes or imperfections. These areas being the frame of the hourglass primarily. I found that when applying I often had to sacrifice hard lines for one consistent application of color. When using fine line work I got a pattern resembling wood grain which ended up being something I embraced and utilized. I would say that even after the process of creating these pieces I have not fully grasped applying Gouache paint to an area smoothly but I have however gained a lot of skill in blending and shading with the medium.
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