Project 1: Representing the Still Life

My Intentions

Originally when looking at the still life I was really inspired by the hook hanging from the rope.  The texture of the rope intrigued me, and something about the hook hanging there from mid air caught my attention.  As I continued to study the still life the chain caught my attention and much later I noticed the wheel.  I decided to use ink as my medium because in one of the first quick contours we did as a class I used ink and loved the way I was able to create the objects on the page.  I started with the chain because I liked the way the chain could carry some of the weight of the page.  Having it start on the page but fall off the page created an interesting composition, because the object had a starting point but no ending point.  Then to offset the chain I added the rope and hook that had originally intrigued me.  When I had successfully created these two pieces on the page I realized I needed something light in the background to help offset the darker two objects and also to help draw the eye away from the lower left hand corner where the hook and the bottom of the chain met.  Once I added a portion of the wheel to the lower part of the composition the overall composition entirely improved.  As a last impulse I decided to add the splats of light ink in the background so that the white wasn’t quite so bright and helped soften the eye to the rest of the image.  The formal decisions I made were the use of a completely black and white scale.  I focused a lot of my energy in this piece on the texture, by creating tiny brush strokes that came together to help form the final object.  I also played a lot with light and dark on my page, with parts of the piece very white like the background, while other parts were very dark like the highlights in the chain or hook.

On my second piece I didn’t really have any intentions.  I had a couple extra days and wanted to just do a fun quick piece with the free time.  I used ink and created the bolts, the jar, and another triangular object.  I didn’t really like the outcome of the ink so I decided I would try using pen, which I had never used before.  I used different thicknesses to outline different shadows in the three objects which really helped to make them stand out and look unique.  I focused mainly on the pen and how to use different amounts of pressure on the pen to outline different values.  The formal decisions I made were to stay in the black and white scale and to play with the lights and darks.   I continued to study texture just instead of small lines to create texture I outlined values.