Life and Death.

So ... final artwork for life and death. For this assignment, I chose a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch and then a rotting jack-o-lantern sitting on a porch. I this is my fourth version of the live pumpkin, so that's good. It really took a while to get the hang of the scale of the pumpkin in relation to the rest of the piece. I had initially had some little pumpkins in the background of the pumpkin patch but did away with those in the final version of this artwork. I added in some leaves in order to balance the color and make it not all just dirt, as well as to bring out the green of the stem as well as the accent color in the pumpkin. I used a flat brush to achieve the grass effect in the back of the pumpkin patch, and a wash of light blue (which didn't translate well in the reproduced image) for the sky of this piece.

Now, moving on to the jack-o-lantern. This one was much more of a struggle. I had been working so long with gouache that I kind of forgot how to use watercolor. Also, this piece is watercolor, which I neglected to mentioned in my earlier ramblings. But anyway, my entire technique was wet on dry and I miiight have been just a little tiny bit "fussy" in doing this assignment. But anyway, instead of scrapping the whole piece, I went in with water and "erased" a lot of what I had laid down earlier. And then I went back in, while the piece was still wet, and added in pigment. I used darker reds, oranges, yellows and browns in addition to the black in order to get the decaying effect. I had initially just had a brown floor and a weird grayish blue background but I decided to change to bricks.

From start to finish, I would say I probably spent about 11 hours, possibly more, on these two pieces combined.