Progress Images:
Drawing from life:
Plant Drawings:
Below are some of the research drawings I made at the Highline, New York, where I was able to study plants from different perspectives and be inspired by the variety of their forms. I experimented with different types of drawings such as mass drawings, continuous line contours, blind contours, and scribble drawings. I found that I liked my continuous line contours and blind contours to be the most impactful, because they seemed to add a sort of intensity and rigidity to natural forms that are originally quite delicate and are constructed by softly curved lines.
The image below is a sustained drawing of one of the forms I found most interesting, due to the rigidity of its lines and form:
Thumbnails
For Project #1, I will be looking at coming nature and the human body, and below are a few of my initial ideas for content and composition. Having worked with both full figure drawings and also focussed drawings on just the hands, face and feet, I found that I was more drawn to creating pieces that zoomed into a certain aspect of the body, rather than the entire body. In the top and bottom left thumbnails, I have tried to integrate the lines from the cross section of tree bark into skin. In the hand, the tree bark lines correlate to the fingerprints, whereas in the portrait, the lines contour the wrinkles on an old man’s face, to put an emphasis on age – since tree bark lines can tell the age of a tree. The top and bottom right and made in reference to skeletal and muscular diagrams, and I have used natural phenomena – such as leaves and tree branches – to construct the bones, muscles, cartilage, veins, etc.
Final Piece
After deciding to move forward, with the fourth design, I took a photo of my own hand, cut out a hole in it, added red, white and yellow lines on its contour to look like cut flesh, and then started layering different plants under the hand to make them look like the interior muscles, veins, ligaments, bones, etc. I also added my own detailed sketch in the under the plants, and continuous line drawings in the background with a low opacity. This piece was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical sketches, in which he presented skeletal features with delicate lines that often resembled the delicacy of plants – especially flower stems and roots. His work also had the slightly worn out, old look due to the brown pages. I tried to recreate this mood through slightly duller images and neutralising vibrant colours. I also gave a modernised feel to the piece by adding the white border, to subvert how diagrams are usually drawn in a traditional way and focussed on realism and detail rather than aesthetic. I also felt that having the hand placed on top of the border gave the piece a three dimensional quality by making it seem as thought the hand was reaching in from outside the frame. With this project I aimed to combine nature with the human form to beautify science, which is a topic that is often seen as unimaginative, technical and/or boring, by portraying a scientific diagram and its features using the vitality of natural structures.
