Bow Project: Imaginative Drawing

This was by far my favorite to come up with, and mostly to execute until I got to the tiles on the wall. But I digress...this concept spoke to me from the very beginning, and I fought with Mrs. Parker for the chance to do it. She finally agreed to allow me to do it as long as I kept a good amount of sophistication in the drawing. The bow is not the focus of the drawing, but it professes an idea that the picture would not function correctly without.

The idea behind it is a little girl, looking through a porthole into the world, but it's not the world that we see. Instead, it is the world in the child's eyes and how the child would present it. It also could be interpreted as a look into the child's imagination; since the chances of a child being in a submarine under the sea are very slim, it is implied that the situation is not real and what we see is a metaphor for the child's imagination. The child is drawn in a graphic style to show her youth, the wall and porthole are drawn in value to show their solidity separating the child and the imaginary world, and the imaginary world is drawn in messy crayon as the child might portray it in a drawing of her own. The bow is important in this setting because it shows that the girl looking through the porthole is a child.

Again, I have very little of this drawing in progress; I have one where it is mostly done.

You can see where I've tried again and again to draw and erase some semblance of shoulders to give the girl's head something to sit upon, but they just never seemed to belong. Each time I added shoulders it weighed the drawing down, making the outside of the porthole more realistic than I intended. I didn't want to include much of the girl's world because I wanted it to be up to the viewer which of the worlds they believed to be "real," and giving the girl a body tipped the scales just a little too far.

The finished product was cut out simply because it was awkwardly situated on the paper. I cut the drawing out irregularly to avoid marks I'd made with crayons and charcoal, but decided that it gave the girl's world the tiniest bit of instability, evening the score of the two worlds.

Finished:

This picture was done in 4B and B pencils, black vine charcoal, and various broken crayons I got at Goodwill.

Finally, the model bow: