Close ups of the details here: http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/timeunfolds/details-cotm-august-2017

To see where I used each material, see my WIP here: http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/timeunfolds/wip-cotm-august-2017

This is my piece for Jazza’s August COTM, ‘Untraditional’. When Jazza first said ‘untraditional’, what I heard was ‘multi-media’ because anything can be used to make art. My first thought was ‘I would like to use garbage in my piece’, since I was eating chocolate bars at the time anyways and thought that garbage would be an interesting material to play with in an art project. I then started to wonder how I could use these wrappers, and then came the idea of polluted water, which then brought me back to something that I had researched for an art idea in college a while ago that I had never had the chance to use:

A ‘Nøkken’, or ‘Neck’, is a creature in Scandinavian folklore that is thought to be some kind of water spirit. Nøkkens are often depicted as beautiful men with long hair that can be found in areas of water, such as rivers and lakes. They are commonly portrayed to be masters of music, playing instruments such as violins or harps. Some stories say that they are peaceful, whilst others depict them as malicious and say that they use their beautiful music in order to lure people into their waters, after which they would drown them. Nøkkens are also thought to be shapeshifters and are sometimes represented as muddy creatures with glowing eyes or white horses.
There are also stories of how giving them a certain offering could appease them and then they would teach you how to play their instrument, though I haven’t presented this idea within my piece.

And so came the idea that I could link this creature to the idea of polluted water, and have him play a ‘requiem’, or ‘song of remembrance’ for his home that is dying from pollution. I outlined the violin in grey and used silver for the strings and outlined the fingerboard with silver sharpie to try and give it a mystical look. The sheet music of the fingerboard is dripping into the water, in an attempt to heal it through the music.

List of materials: Chocolate bar wrappers, bin liner, green fabric, leather, wool and thread, green tassel-like material that I don’t know the name of (used for the grass), paper, PVA and super glue, wire, box tape, parcel paper, acrylic paint, silver and bronze sharpies, broken mirror shards, silver shred confetti, old sheet music, water lily pot pourri pieces, barbeque wood chips, selotape, a stick, black ribbon (for part of the violin bow), pearlescent acrylic ink, feathers painted black, coloured pencil, decorative craft paper and finally a bunch of plant life I gathered such as ivy, leaves, flowers etc.

For my sketch I took pictures of myself and my brother holding my violin for reference. I’m a lefty, just in case you’re wondering why the violin looks ‘the wrong way’.

[The idea of the broken mirror for the sky was so I could take my picture outside and use the real sky’s reflection for the sky in my piece, this way the time of day the picture is set depends on the time of day it is taken outside. It was about to rain so I had to hurry, but I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t get any clouds to reflect in the mirror :’( oh well!]