The Practice of Smiling

Today's brief is a group project to create a landscape from imagination. We chose the unifying theme of exploring how different cultures deal with death. It's fascinating to me how death can be used either to celebrate the beauty of life or mourn the eternal tragedy of the mortal coil. We all chose a culture for our individual images, from Ancient Egyptian mythology to the Mexican Day of the Dead tradition. I chose Victorian Gothic, because I'm a needlessly dour individual who idolises being gaunt and feeling like an outsider. Anyway, I set to work with ink sketches of real life Victorian cemeteries from online reference images.

I like idea of using a faux-naive drawing style that depicts the setting with a simplicity that conveys feeling over realism, and black ink seemed the obvious choice to associate with the monochrome photographs of the era.

This was my submission for an actual imagined landscape. I'm not fond of it. The composition's kind of interesting, but it lacks vision and I can't help wanting to make something more refined. It really needs some explicitly fantastical elements to make it memorable because right now it's just dull. Knowing me, I'll no doubt find the time to develop this morbid concept into something more worthy of audiences' eyes.