how to depict one subject in four ways – Sun, Moon, Stars (Alice's Grand Adventures)

One fun art project is to depict the same subject in four different ways. It’s a really enjoyable thing to do and it helps you stretch your creativity. And so, I did exactly that. I started off with an ink drawing that I made in response to the Inktober week six prompt, which was “granny.” The image below is of Bearnacle Bear, when he was a small bear cub who was referred to as Baby Bear, and his granny. This image is on drawing paper.

Here they are. They are excited about the big honey pot, as well as about sharing adventures together.

The first variation on a theme that I chose was to do an underpainting with acrylic paint, using a limited palette. The colors that I used were red, yellow, blue, and white. I had black available, but I didn’t need it. Then I added the details with marker, making the image mixed media. The painting is on a scanvas board.

I really enjoyed using the limited palette, which consisted mainly of primary colors. It was fun to mix the paints and see how many different colors, as well as shades, come out. If you mix all three primary colors, you get a brownish sort of color. It’s kiind of dark, so you’re going to want to add a little white to lighten that.

After finishing the first two versions, I decided to use the wonderful gift of technology to facilitate the third and the fourth versions, which are different types of collage. In the first type of collage, I included repeating images of granny and baby bear in different sizes, along with a background and some birds that I found in a magazine printed in the 1960s. Originally, my plan was to cut up magazine images for the collage, but the magazines seemed as if they should be preserved intact, so I made color copies.

This to me was loads of fun. It was like creating all sorts of clones of the two bears. They are now a family of clones. There are many people who criticize technology and hold it responsible for a loss of creativity. I would say that the opposite is true. Technology doesn’t destroy creativity. It is a tool that can enable creativity. Quite honestly, reproducing the bears over and over and over again by hand would be time consuming. Being able to get these copies facilitates the creative process for me.

And now, version four. This combined the technology of photo copying in different sizes and in black and white, as well as in color, with scissors (low tech). This image includes multiple copies of the bears and the honey pot in both black and white and in color. I cut up all of the images, except for one small version, and I glued them on a piece of card stock in a random fashion. The whole process of cutting and gluing took an entire afternoon, but it was fun because it was random.

I truly enjoyed this exercise. I would like to thank the Grand Island Memorial Library for access to the bin of free magazines, the donor of the magazines for providing those historic gems, and the Island Ship Center for the initial photocopies. This is a project I would definitely encourage you to try. There are so many different artistic mediums to choose from. Let your imagination run free and have fun!

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