the story

While I was home for winter break last year, my mother asked me to create a painting for our newly-redecorated living room. The redecoration had focused primarily around grey, white, steel blue, and burnt orange tones as well as furniture with sleek silhouettes, so my mother wanted a large modern piece that could tie into the existing elements and colors of the room. From this point I began sketches many different variations of geometric patterns, playing with both circles and straight lines in order to both reflect the largely straight-edged furniture in the room while also adding a bit of softness and intrigue. As I kept playing around, I found that a sun-and-moon theme could be interesting to balance out the modern and somewhat mechanical straight edges within the piece. This eventually evolved into the second picture above, which was one of my final digital drafts of the piece. I decided to make the organic, celestial shapes in warm colors, and use colder colors for the straight lines and diagonals. There is also an element of separation, in which the sun's rays are just barely unable to reach the different faces of the moon: this was inspired by the way in which light is let in by the various windows in the living and adjacent rooms.

In translating the drawing to acrylic paint, I found it slightly more difficult to keep some of the original nuance such as the fade of colors; I opted instead to use solid colors to keep the piece simpler. I also chose to paint the straight edges free-handed in order to create a slightly more organic feel to the brush strokes. Lastly, some of the colors ended up having a higher contrast than first intended, however I decided to shift the color values once I had tried out various swatches in the room, especially in consideration with the various darker brown elements of the living room's furniture. Though the design didn't necessarily translate completely from digital to acrylic mediums, my mother and I were still pleased with the overall end result (and compliments from my mother's friends didn't hurt either).