Watercolor was a medium I was very used to using as I have used it multiple times before. However, my previous ways of using this medium contrasted with the proper way of using watercolor, as before, I used this medium like acrylic and painted it using the brush. The new way our professor taught us was to wash large amounts of pigment into a pool of water, and let the water guide the colors and use the brush to its minimal. It was hard to break out of using watercolor like I did previously, but eventually I was able to use the medium to its fullest potential.

For one of the images I designed for the expression: Expansive in the previous project, I decided to draw in white holes with a black surrounding. I have trypophobia which is a phobia for patterns of holes i.e. lotus root, beehive, etc, and I thought it was interesting to create a bigger gradation image with my phobia.

At first, I had difficulty understanding what complex gradation was. I didn’t understand exactly why one image would be complex and the other a regular gradation. However, upon viewing and researching complex gradation images, I was able to understand the term and apply it to my work. The second difficulty I faced was creating images of figures that conveyed emotion. I first did a charcoal drawing of a figure image I got from the web which obviously did not meet the criteria or the expectation of the work I was supposed to create. Then, I decided to incorporate ballet moves I saw during our visit to the Ballet performance, as not only were they interesting in form, but they were very emotionally expressive. I also merged drawings of branches and parts of trees in black to create a more interesting and expressive complex figure images.

Emotions & Expressions was the first project I was faced with when I first joined this class during the third week. I was overwhelmed by the high qualities of work produced by my peers and was pressured to be good too. I remember the professor questioning my decision in joining the class the third week into the semester and warning me that the class would be tough especially with the extra workload I had to catch up with. The class as I warned was tough. However, it is undoubtedly true that I got so much more out of this class than any other classes, and improved more than I possibly could in such a short period of time.

Some of the images created for the emotions did had to be revised to better portray the indicated emotion (marked in green and red in the second image attached).