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SI #4
Experimentation
Left to die in the sea alongside the skeletons of who I used to be. People often look back at their past selves, grimacing with cringe as they remember who they used to be. For me, I would hate my past self for my personality and how I didn’t fit in with others. This led to obsessively hiding my past, trying to distract others with who I am now. I wanted to embody the action of throwing yourself away, but in a shocking way. To do this, I drew myself murdering my past self, who is left to decompose in the sea alongside the other discarded selves. I put this in an ocean setting because the ocean is mysterious - we don’t know what lurks beneath the surface. We don’t know when the traits of our past selves will come back to the shore, haunting our present selves. Additionally, I rendered softly in order to capture the accuracy of the seafoam, then I went back with sharp brushes to emphasize the blood. This created a contrast, focusing attention on the morbid action that occurred.
Notes 12/7/23
Since my other SI's have been mostly focused on how your environment and people can cause you to lose your sense of identity, this piece is centered around destroying your sense of identity yourself. I want to communicate here the process of killing your sense of identity so you can forget about yourself.
Artist Research:
An artist I'm inspired by is Mihifuhi, especially for how they can ideate and incorporate intriguing concepts in their art as metaphors for deeper meaning. For example, they draw fanart for an anime I like - Madoka Magica, a dark psychological magical girl anime. In their art they use unorthodox concepts to communicate deeper meaning - wiping away soap, a button up shirt, etc. They twist these normal ideas to something more sinister than expected.
Materials exploration:
I'm going to be using digital once again because I appreciate how versatile it can be - an access to many brushes and colors all at a touch of the hand. This time, I want to go even more detail oriented, especially with seafoam on the beach and on the blood seeping away into the ocean. I want to go so meticulously detailed that it's freaky to the viewer.
Ideation:
I was inspired by the ocean for some reason - it's seemingly peaceful despite what lurks underneath. I wanted to invoke that feeling in my drawing - a color palette of cool tones that seem soothing to the viewer, but suddenly attracts that attention towards the dark blood in the drawing. Here, a corpse of me is laying in the ocean, ready to be taken away into the ocean and swept away by waves. Corpses decompose and that's specifically why I chose this concept - they decompose to where you can't see them anymore but are still a part of the world because they decomposed into the Earth. They're still deeply ingrained into the Earth, and I wanted to use that to show no matter how many identities we kill off, they're still greatly ingrained in us somewhere. There are skeletons cradling the corpse as well to show how they decompose and they're also versions of myself that I reject. I have a knife and standing by my corpse because I am the one that murdered myself - I discarded the parts of myself that I don't like.
Technical development:
With digital drawing, it's much easier to cover large areas with color but for this piece, I want to incorporate so many different colors in the drawing that to the viewer may not notice, but still has that feel of so many things coming together at once. I also want to go even more focused on details to emphasize certain parts to the drawing - seafoam and the blood. I'm going to use a variety of brushes in order to achieve this details look and utilize small ones in particular to get zoomed in.