Start of my artist research:
Initial ideas mindmap:
For this mindmap my main goal was to try and come up with my overall topic of what I was going to do my work on. I normally lean more towards decay and how nature takes over but from this mind map it help me chose to broaden my overall topic to nature and what we miss about it in everyday life. This mind-map helped me decide to go out of my comfort zone and try something slightly different to what i would normally do my work on. I think its a good idea that I picked a slightly different angel of the subject that I normally do work on.
The start of my sketch book I used to do some quick research of a few artists that I found initially when looking at people who fit in with and match my theme. Here I focused on two main questions of who are they and why I like their work and how I could apply some of their work and ideas to mine. Overall these where just quick ideas of which artists I could research and would make it easy when I came to write some up properly later on. I added to these later on my website and found a few other artists to.
The original ideas where sketched out in pencil to get an outline that I could follow. Doing this before drawing the real things also gave me a chance to work out shading and where the details where going. I did this with most of the pen drawings before starting.
Sketches and pen drawings:
The first ideas I had for my topic was to represent the details that we miss, look close up at plants and flowers and represent some of that detail in them. I wanted to test out what effect pen drawings would have and if it looked how I wanted it to. I knew from these that this was not the route I wanted to go down. I did like the effect that these drawings had but overall wasnt as attention grabbing as I wanted them to be , so I will try some other materials .
This is just a really quick sketch of a bigger painting I did on A3, I decided I would pre-sketch this really rough so I could visualise the piece better in my head before I painted the real thing. This also helped me work out the perspective of the final piece better.
The Final Painting:
The first painting of a leaf was just me testing if I think using oil colours would be a good medium which I quickly decided against for a big painting as I thought acrylic would be quicker and easier to layer to get my desired effect better. The blue bugs are done with water colour pencils and again didn't really like this overall outcome.
This is the initial planning that I did for the bug models that I made. My initial idea was to use some sort of bell jars and these where going to be a mini set of 3. Instead of doing this I ended up finding some glass storage containers with bamboo lids that I used upside down to create almost the same effect and I ended up liking this better.
These are some experiments I did on black paper and using white pen. I overall really liked how these turned out and this lead to me doing mini scratch off copper art and I did a little series of 4 where the background was black and the thistles where the copper under colour. I think these really worked well and has a really nice effect , I think I liked the copper ones better than the black and white because it added more texture and nice little twist to the work.