Spirit of Sunset
By Olivia, Year 9
Size: 58cm x 41cm
Date finished: 09/06/2023
The artwork is a series of drawings and paintings. What my artwork is trying to portray is about beaches identity - social, emotional, and physical. The elements that are most obvious in my work are the use of watercolour, charcoal and oil pastels. This is because I have used watercolours that are most seen in a sunset, the colours of the ocean and the sand. The charcoal drawings show two drawings of a sunset and a palm tree. The reason why I chose to do a palm tree is because tropical beaches always have palm trees. The reason why I chose to do an oil pastel sketch is because it shows the colours of the sunset, contrasting with black.
The media that I used to make my artwork were ink, watercolours, black acrylic paint, oil pastels and charcoal. The tools and techniques that I used to create my artwork were paint brushes, paper, pencils and paint. The techniques used were painting and drawing. First I planned my artwork out with pencil, then I started to paint with watercolour using pink, yellow, blue, green, purple and orange colours. Then I used black ink to write the word “Beach” in fancy letters.
Beaches were inspiring to me as beaches help physically, socially, and mentally. Beaches help mentally as they can lower stress levels, they are a place where people can socialise with others and they can provide space to do physical activity. My artwork expresses my social issues as it is important for people that always go surfing or walk on the beach. The emotions that the artwork is trying to show is sad, happy and joy at the same time.
My goal as an artist is to create an artwork that expresses the identity of beaches in general. This piece helped me to reach my goal because the artwork expresses the identity of beaches. Something that I learned when creating this artwork is how to use charcoal to make shading, then using charcoal to draw over the shaded charcoal and how to do sketch art. This artwork was not the final piece that I imagined. This is because I wanted to do an animation showing over the artwork that had pictures and a drawing of beach.
