honeycomb the trilogy

This is a painting that I did with watercolor, I started out with the hexagon design and then started to paint lightest to darkest. I really tried to not destroy my highlight cause I always make it too dark and then there is no highlight, which is no fun.

Rhythm is always the obvious principle of design since it is just a hexagon repeated over and over again. Contrast is another principle with the contrast between the dark and light colors. I tried to add depth in the shadows and with the walls of the honeycomb.

I was just trying to further my watercolor skills and get more realistic in my paintings. I think so far this has been my best attempt at honeycombs, I really took my time on it and I think it really paid off in the end.

I like how this turned out, I'm really satisfied with it, I think it looks detailed which is what I wanted. I still think it can be improved even more and one day I hope to achieve getting as realistic with the honeycomb as I possibly can.

another honeycomb

This an acrylic piece I did on a wood slab. It was my typical honeycomb design but I wanted to challenge myself and do it in acrylic. It didn't come out as realistic as I had hoped it would but I don't work i acrylic often so my skills are still developing. I started but tracing the hexagon pattern over the whole surface and then went in with a deep brown and traced around the sides creating the "walls" of the honeycomb where the honey is held inside. I then went in with three shades (an orange yellow, yellow, and a very pale yellow) and painted the honey. At the end, I went in with a lighter brown and tried adding highlights to the walls. Then after that, I covered the top surface with Resin to create a shiny finish.

Repetition is the main principle since it literally is just the same pattern repeated over and over again. There is texture in the wood which is one of the reasons I wanted to paint on this because I wanted to try working on texture and seeing if it would change my painting in any way. A way I tried adding depth was using a darker yellow on one side and then a lighter shade of yellow on the opposite side. It didn't turn out how I wanted it to but I am not mad with the overall product.

Every time I paint honeycombs I don't really have a reason why other than I felt like it. I don't know why I enjoy painting them so much, I think I find some sort of comfort in the repetition. At this point another reason I paint these is that I'm trying to make them more realistic each time I paint them, my goal is to get so realistic with them that you can't tell it's just a piece of paper.

I mentioned before that this piece didn't turn out how I had hoped it would of turned out, I was hoping it'd look more like the real thing versus just a pattern or design. I think where I messed up was in the overall shading of the honey, it was so simple and not detailed enough. But even throughout all the disappointment, I am still proud of how it turned out.

Art Journal

Throughout most of the 3rd quarter I worked in a watercolor journal. I filled up the entire thing from front to back over most of the quarter. I don't want to show all of it because it is mostly personal and really weird. I did a lot of minimalistic art in the journal though, and used a lot of quotes and lyrics.

Something that was common in my paintings was that I would use mostly muted colors and then just have emphasis on one color. I also painted a lot of nature, I've been working on getting more realistic with my watercolor paintings. I also painted a lot of things out of my comfort zone in this journal. I tried painting things that I wasn't confident would come out looking good or that I didn't really how to approach.

Pinterest was my best friend during this whole process, I got a lot of my inspiration from there. I usually looked up a lot of concept images and would always look at the related images to an image that I really liked. Sometimes I would find an image that I wasn't particularly fond of as a whole but maybe there was one part of it I really liked or there would be an overall theme that I took inspiration from.

As an overall, I really liked how the journal came out. There are some pieces in it that I do not like at all but I kept them in because it is all a growing process and even the worst of my art is still art. But there is also some pieces that I am really proud of. They might be really simple but I have learned to love minimalistic art and how something could be so simple yet so meaningful.

watercolor honeycomb

This is a watercolor piece that was inspired by the honeycomb. I used all watercolor and also used a hexagon stencil to create the design all over the page. I made sure to use different shades of yellow and orange to the piece to make it more interesting and have more depth.

Rhythm is clearly the most distinct principle throughout the piece, with the constant repetition of the hexagon design over the whole page. There is a nice balance between light and dark with the honeycombs progressively getting darker as the design goes down. Unity flows throughout the piece as well with the hexagons fitting perfectly next to each other and coming together, creating a design.

I was inspired by bees for this piece. Not too long ago, the bee went on the endangered species list and that is a really big deal, at least to me it is. Earth relies heavily on bees and if they were to become extinct, we would all be screwed. According to Albert Einstein, the human species would only live for about four years after bees went extinct, which is not a lot of time at all.

I am quite happy with this piece. I really just wanted to focus on color mixing and texture for this piece and I think I did pretty well at that. I would say that if I were to do this piece again, I'd try to make it neater but I actually feel like the messiness of the piece actually adds something to it.