For this piece, I used inspiration from a bout of good weather. Though I spent the day working and couldn’t be outdoors as much as some of my peers, I still felt that unmistakable taste of spring – the fresh smells, the bright sun, the sounds of college kids leaving their dorms. I also began to think more about the quick approach of the end of the school year. For me, that means long hours working on final projects, but it also means graduation, time off before grad school, and a biennial beach vacation. 

 

I digress; I just mean to say that all those thoughts went into this piece, as I tried to include bright colors and images of new, blooming life that comes with spring. 

 

If my perspective piece was the most familiar and safe, this piece was the polar opposite. Every stroke of a brush felt like I was leaving myself up to fate. I had to get used to getting just the right amount of water and pigment to create even color but not make the whole thing look watery and amorphous. I’ve even done watercolor before (as an adult) but the whole process still seems like guesswork to me and the piece doesn’t look nearly as polished as I had hoped in my mind. 

 

I think that’s alright, because it gave me more sense of how to create realistic art. I was thinking abstractly as I did this piece – grass is spiky and bright green, flowers are pink and blue, a stream is a dirty blue-green-brown. In reality, there’s more to creating a realistic scene than that. There are contours and shading in the grass, there are spots of green leaves within bunches of flowers, and (most blatant of all) water is dynamic and reflective and transparent to varying degrees.