Making the invisible visible

I actually did not sketch this piece at all. Originally I was going to do a whole other project, focusing on the idea of how stillness is invisible until made visible and how staring at simple things in nature can almost stop time. Instead, I stuck with the idea of nature but went with an entirely different theme. This piece is focusing on the math of nature. It doesn’t automatically occur to us that nature has a pattern to it, a certain geometry, that is not random (therefore it is invisible to us). In this piece I am highlighting the measurements of the radii of each elliptical wave generated by a disturbance to the water by the plant. As you can see by the measurements, although the lengths of the radii of each ellipse are not equal, there is a pattern (or ratio) that determines how big each ring gets relative to the previous one. The measurements makes the math of nature more visible to the viewer.

Critiques I received in creating this piece included created more shadows and highlights between each wave, and making it more obvious that the plant created this wave in the first place. Also moving the origin of the wave more towards the center of the piece was another critique that I received.

My inspiration for this project was my original idea of drawing something in nature, in which I looked at many still life pictures of leaves and plants in water. Another inspiration I had for this project was I guess math class. The biggest challenge I encountered while working on this project was drawing the wave. It was very hard to make it look as realistic as possible because I find it really hard to draw something that resembles water, especially when it is just black and white. This project ties together other concepts I have learned because it focuses on the idea of blending and shading as well as using the write graphite tools to make the piece come to life. My favorite part of this assignment was the brainstorming process and choosing exactly what topic I was going to focus on conveying in my art.