I have painted 4 pieces that are all connected as a series. I wanted to emphasize the emotional behavior that animals can convey. Each painting has a portrait of a cat with a different emotion, I specifically focused on the feelings of anger, euphoria, sadness, and rash wildness. The background of each portrait is meant to represent and be connected to the emotion of the portrait itself. The media I have chosen to use within this project was strictly acrylic paint.
With my decision of this project, I was inspired to make this piece as I wanted to branch out more into my artistic skill of not ever painting animals before. One of the artists who inspires me is Carlos Delgado, he shows emotions like nostalgia within his work. I wanted to portray that as well, but with animals instead. I chose this topic because I always thought that it had relevance to me, and conveying emotion is important to the culture of socializing with people. Especially as I was always more of a person who would listen rather than talk, so I paid more attention to body language and emotion that was being conveyed in a person's face.
Though I wouldn’t say I entirely struggled with creating this complete set of portraits, for me I really struggled with sketching out the design of the animal, I wasn’t familiar with drawing the body and face of something that wasn’t human. With overcoming this struggle I would use basic shapes to build the body of the animal while still keeping the features defined.
With my paintings my message that I want to convey throughout the portraits is the wildness of emotions that animals can feel. As I feel it's important to society, of not only humans but also animals, as we go based off of our feelings. I think its an important message not only to me, but I want other people to look at my art and question why are they feeling that way, or what made them feel that way. I want them to question the meaning behind my art.
I think I did a good job portraying the emotions that I had selected, I also think I did quite well on the fur. What I think I can improve on is getting better at drawing the structure of animals, as well as make them look a bit cleaner. For an example I feel as though I could have done better on my fourth painting as it tends to look a bit messy to me.
While going through this journey and experience I have learned that I definitely need to pratice drawing and painting animals more, as it was something completely out of my comfort zone. Although I also learned that it didn’t turn out as bad as I thought it would, however I do think I could improve on the painting techniques.