THE HARE

Finished Drawing:

Original Sketch:

I created a fine liner drawing of a hare by merging reference pictures together that I found on Pinterest. 

In my original sketch, I drew the skull of the hare just above the head, joining the skull & the hare together with gestural lines with the aim to connect them like string or torn skin. This idea I found was weak, as the skull took away from the hare. The hare itself was stronger on its own as it showed motion & looks alert.

When drawing the hare, I used a mixture of crosshatching & directional line to build up tones, shadows & texture. This was much less time consuming than focusing on each individual hair & still created an image that looks like a hare, without the need to be realistic or detailed. I took a less neat approach to continue the appearance of there being movement & liveliness.

I feel this drawing represents both these ideas well through the media & technique, however the drawing by itself is too plain & the message behind it could be pushed forward more through some sort of background.

 

To start with, I printed out different coloured versions of this piece; blue, yellow & green. The blue works well as it softens the harsh lines in the piece, giving it a more gentle feel. The green worked well too & created a stronger link to nature in the sense that we link the colour green to plants, trees & grass, which are natural forms. However the yellow didn’t work well as the colour was too light against white paper, stopping the hare from being so visible.

I created a circular cut out in the background of the hare so that I could put magazine imagery behind it to experiment with colour, shapes & ideas/concepts.

From the pictures above, I feel bright colours help create a strong contrast within the piece which also made the hare stand out much more due to the bold & dark lines in the drawing against the softer & brighter objects in the painting background. 

From this, I then created my own background using different shades of pink acrylic paint in diagonal & horizontal lines. I feel this worked really well with the drawing & gave a similar effect to the imagery I had experimented with beforehand.  

Another idea I had was to use text from newspapers or books & layer them underneath the cutout. This idea makes the piece have a more illustrative feel & looks as though it’s an image from a story book. I like the effect this gives, & to better push forward the meaning & concept behind the piece, I could use text that relates to the drawing. This could be from a story book about a hare, or something to do with the contrast between life & death. I could then print letters on top of this, to form words that hold relevance. 

Although the yellow print didn’t come out as strong as the others, I still felt I could do something with it. I began cutting out shapes from the hare using a Stanley knife, mostly focusing on the white space in the piece & general outlines of areas to create the shape of the head & other smaller features. 

I really like the way this turned out due to the way the differing directional curves give the piece a loose & windswept feel. The different leaf like sections suggest decay through the way the hare is divided into different small sections that can be put together to create the animal. The piece almost reduces the hare down into building blocks, in a very basic form. 

With this, I would like to create a stencil using the laser cutter to then create spray painted prints or maybe put it into a real life setting to show the motion of life, time, & the impermanence of it. 

Another idea is to join the original drawing to the cut out so they’re both facing away from each other. This would continue the contrast between life & death & will represent how all beings are a ghost of themselves.

Each being is temporary & when we’re gone, who we are is reduced to memories & pictures. The picture below is a version of this idea I created using two prints of the piece on acetate. I really like the two facing away from each other due to its symmetrical composition, however I feel it needs some sort of background colour to help push forward the idea of contrasting sides.

An artist who relates to this piece is Sophie Ryder who creates sculptures using —— to create hares and other animals. 

Although these are very dissimilar to my work, I really like the unnatural aspect to her sculptures. The way she positions them & the actions she makes them look as though they’re doing creates a sort of strange human-like feeling. She's also showing a relationship between different animals which don’t normally mix together.