Visualizing Ecology
Week 8:  Watercolor Assignment
Due Week 9 (Wednesday)

Technical Assignment

Make a page of flesh tones mixing various combinations of reds and yellows.  Label your mixtures.  If you have a palette without named colors just name them cool yellow or warm yellow, etc.  

Go to a public place.  Make 10 gesture paintings of figures without sketching them first.

In preparation for your portrait, make five gesture drawings each of mouths, noses, ears, and eyes.  Use washes to indicate the shading like we did in class.  Be sure you draw these from life.

Expressive Assignment

In this program, we have been exploring our ethical relationships with other species of plants and animals.  As a human being you have ethical standing. We are wondering how you think this ethical standing extends from you to other species.  For example in Pollan’s chapter, “The Ethics of Eating Animals” Pollan discusses Pete Singer’s point that we should not eat sentient beings.  Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac writes about a land ethic.  Your assignment this week is to make a self-portrait or a portrait of another person that expresses the subject’s personal ethics regarding the treatment of non-human organisms.

The size of the portrait should be at least a quarter sheet of watercolor paper.  A half-sheet might be better.