Heart

This was the final of my EOY painting last year. It's a heart with many, many veins all around in the background.

I wanted to make a heart because, I feel that the heart is a really, really, really vital organ. I mean, it's between the brain or the heart right? Like, which is more important.

Some say it's the brain because it's unique and nobody else can have the same brain as you. But, then I thought, so what if you have a working brain but your heart isn't working? I mean, without the heart pumping, it's not like having a brain is gonna be of any use. But, so long as the heart is still beating, anything can happen. That's why, in a way, the heart is also a physical barrier for man.

If someone is in a coma and pronounced brain dead, it doesn't mean the heart ceases to work. It can still work with the help of support. Then again, the brain can't be start up by anything huh? So which exactly is more important? I'll leave this question for now and continue talking about my artwork.

What I've done is almost like what I had in mind. I wanted something really complicated. But I didn't want to kill myself, so I settled for semi-complicated. I had shaded the same thing several times, scanned it in the computer and played with the colour on Photoshop. (below)




I intended to paint it in red, so I changed the hues to a monochrome of red to see what it might look like. I think it's actually quite different from how red it actually turned out to be. But I like them both equally.

I also drew the heart and the veins separately initially:






And finally, I combined them together and that was what it looked like.

I also tried to play with the composition:




But, I think it wasn't very useful in the end. I feel that it looks best when the heart is central, it shows the importance of a heart.

For the medium, I used poster paint. In actual reality, I wish I could have used oil paint.. It would have been much easier to do all the blending. But I'm still quite pleased because, before coming to Nanyang, I have never actually painted anything for whatever reason. So I was quite an amateur at painting, regardless of the type of paint I use.

I didn't even score an A I think. But I think I tried my best in blending and I'm satisfied with the outcome. I could have chose to do something easier, where I only need flat plains of colours, like a cartoon or something. But I challenged myself, choosing something difficult rather than settling for something easy.