. . . Go buy a Flower and Vase and Make a Still Life

My favorite part of any project is researching. I love it! I have gotten so good at researching that I can gather a lot of information (say 20 sources) in a short amount of time (1-2 hours): my motto is that you can never have too much research, and as a result, my works cited page ends up being two or three pages long. However, researching for the art projects has been a little different than my researching habits for English papers. Instead of researching for essays in databases, I am researching images in broad search engines like Google.com. It takes longer to weed out the things I don't need, and sometimes, I have to go through 15 pages of find the image I want. Regardless of the time used, I eventually find what I am looking for . . . or so I thought this time.

Red Gerbera Daisy

These key words pulled-up a lot of images that I found useful. With them, I was able to pull together a rough sketch of the design I wanted to do for this project. After getting the approval for this design, I sat down to do another, more detailed sketch . . . the images I found were of no help this time. I found myself throwing away several sketches - they were worse than my first sketch. "What do I do now?" I thought to myself. ". . ."

". . . go buy a flower and a vase and make a still life." So that's what I did. I decided to go to Hobby Lobby and buy a silk flower instead of going to Mystic Floral and getting a real flower. (AnnMarie always has red Gerberas.) The silk flower would allow me to bend it in to different positions, and silk flowers don't die.

The silk flower worked out rather well, and I was able to make a sketch that I was happy with.

At first I didn't want to use a full-frontal view of the flower, but Gerberas have long, curved stems and I felt like the stem took-away from the design. (Plus, when people have flowers on their desks, they often have the flower's face facing them so it makes sense to have a frontal view of the flower.) I hope everyone in class is as pleased with it as I am. I've already made preparations to transpose it on to my nice charcoal and pastel paper tomorrow during class.