Project 4 Part 2: An Emotional Response

    The assignment was to translate the emotions of creepy and sinister, soft and pliable, spiky and brittle, and dramatic and flamboyant, which are represented here respectively. I had never worked with watercolors prior to this other than as an activity to keep me busy as a kid, so a lot of this process was experimenting with the different textures and shapes I could create by holding the brush differently or using more or less water. I didn't realize how versatile watercolors allow you to be because you can create endless different saturations of paint. I took the freedom that this medium allowed me to feel and tried to translate that into the four very different emotions. I wanted to try to use different colors in each one because of how closely related colors and emotions tend to feel. I usually try to focus in on a visual source of inspiration, so painting abstract designs was also something I wan't familiar with but that again I felt like the medium lent itself to.

     For the creepy and sinister painting, I knew I wanted to punch up the saturation on the red in the editing, and shrouding it in the black shadow adds to the menacing nature that I was going for. It looks like something I would hang up during Halloween, which is always my favorite aesthetic. For the soft and pliable painting, I used the brush tool to create these flower petal designs on a yellow rose. I like that when I was painting it I was thinking of a sunset, but it became a flower when I started editing. That two step approach to creating a final piece has been really interesting. For the spiky and brittle painting I took the technicolor approach. The focus of this for me was the frantic nature of the lines, and the extra colors added even more reflections of those lines. For the last painting, dramatic and flamboyant, I created the most intense change from the original piece. The colors are inverted and exists almost as an antithesis to the original; I thought the most dramatic thing would be to create two surprising versions that are the light and dark of the other.