Anatomy of emotion

As my most recent piece, I decided to create something that was representative of me instead of my insights and surroundings (As most of my pieces do) I decided on a piece that would define and illustrate parts of my personality that most people may or may not see on a regular basis, I chose to display two important parts of my personality (for better or worse) Anger/Passion, and Indifference, you may be thinking "Huh S*****n, thats THREE personality traits!" Well, to me Passion and Anger are of the same kin, for me to be angry, I have to be passionate about it, and to be passionate about something, I have to Invested enough to defend it. Indifference is basically the polar opposite of Passion, and represents my lack of an ability to care about the little things, sometimes coming across as an ass (I KNOW right???). The cool colours represent the Indifferent side, while the warmer contrasting colours represent my more Passionate side.

I have dubbed the piece "Anatomy of emotion"; the piece to me was conceptually easy to form, the idea for the look of the piece just seemingly popping into my head, but was physically difficult to create, in a way; I knew what I wanted, but at the same time, I wasn't sure how to apply it in reality, I bounced back and fourth between mediums; paint, gel-medium, simple contour, to even some more crazy things. But in the end I settled on contour and marker; mainly because marker is one of the mediums I have actually never explored truly, where with paint, pencil/pen, I am quite well versed, and I wanted to try something new (despite never even picking up a marker before!) because in art, experimentation is one of the core principles to follow.

One of the things I was quite happy with was how well the colours work with each other, using complimentary contrast to my advantage to create a unified piece; where I think if I had used another set of colours, the piece would have felt more unbalanced. For this piece I really used quite a Smorgasbord of mediums; from ink to pencil-crayon, water-colour to marker, I really tried to make this very different compared to what I usually do, "Time to experiment!" I said. Even though my choice of mediums seems quite random, it is quite the opposite, while I used marker and ink to create the foreground of my piece I also wanted a background that was very distinguishable from the focus of the viewer, while keeping it unified through the use of complimentary contrast, using water-colour and pencil crayon (sparingly!).

The one thing that somewhat disappointed me was the fact that I was unable to create the same emotion as the original sketch I drew, that I felt had a lot more raw lines making up the piece, which I was unable to achieve due to the clean look I was going for, although I do feel my message is quite clear, and despite this, I do believe my piece is quite successful.