The Plant People

        When taking a life drawing class, we spend most of our time analyzing, drawing, and embracing the human body in our work. The human body has always been something that I've been interested in incorporating into my work, much longer before I even know figure drawing was a thing. I always wanted to draw portraits of my friends and family growing up, and now that I've taken two figure drawing classes, I can comfortably say that I am familiar enough with the human form now to utilize that knowledge in work I create going forward with all of the practice that I've had. With this knowledge and comfortability, I wanted to create works using my imagination and taking the concrete human figure and turning it into something more exotic and dream like. Imagery of psychedelic art and surrealism have always wowed me. I find myself drawn to imagery that contains a wide variety of cool and warm colors that contrast and play off of each other, and have a "dreamy" or "fairy" like quality. When we did the hybrid body pieced, this really got me inspired to create more works that embody the human form but aren't fully human. 

        Drawing inspirations from aspartame style artwork, I created a body of 3 works that are all the same size on 18" by 24" pieces of water color paper. I then did a back ground wash using either gouche or water color paints in pink tones. Then I sketched on the initial drawings using pencil, drew over it with sharpie marker and then colored in the bodies with colored pencil. I chose to use anything but skin toned pencils, because I wanted these female figures to look human but also make it clear that they aren't entirely human, but something other worldly. After that, I added on the collage elements of plants and flowers either covering the face completely or surrounding them as if the nature is all they live amongst, and are a part of it. I really wanted to amplify the idea of a human and nature hybrid, and make these women almost like "plant people", where they are half human, half plant. Then I aded some 3D collage elements like glitter, flowers, rhinestones, and splattered some water color paint to add more dimension to the pieces. After experimenting with this style of art and creating human nature hybrids, I feel compelled to continue this as a larger series and draw inspiration from this theme of work as a larger part of my artistic practice.