Grappling With Nature Series - No. 1 (Competition For Affection and Resources) | Mixed Media Project

For the Summer season, I began a new mixed media alien series titled "Grappling With Nature". The inspiration for the series is my affinity for nature. With this series of projects, I hoped to reveal my view and love of nature with humans' relationship with it through art. Interactions with nature can produce two results: positive or negative.

Acceptance, preservation, conservation, and residing cohesively alongside nature are positive outcomes.

Encroachment, endangerment, poaching, over-fishing, excessive consumption, arson or intentional deforestation that results in the destruction of the natural environment, pollution of waterways, overfishing, and the general, continuance in depleting resources valuable to the growth and future population of the various species.

My first design for the series is titled "Competition for Affection and Resources".

Competition For Affection and Resources

When young, my siblings and I often engaged in fierce competitions. Whether for supremacy in outdoor play (this included hanging from a rope or who could swing the highest), indoor activities, sleeping arrangements, dinner seating order, or passenger seating placements, the struggle was real. And it was intensive. Being the middle child didn't help my situation in the rank and file order.

The older siblings ruled. The younger ones were favored. So, that left me to fend for myself with no cliques within the family for support. Keeping score was exhausting, but exhilarating.

No one child can receive an equal amount of affection. There's only so many hours in the day during downtime to attend to six children's individual needs. So it certainly is in nature with offspring. However, in nature, sometimes the entire community pack, herd, or other name for the unit or group assists with rearing, feeding, and protection.

Someone is always going to receive the short end of the stick, as they say. And if you ask any one child, that person will say it was him. The same in nature. This is due to the fact that when young, your world revolves around you only. Nothing else matters in ensuring that your needs are met.

While designing my series, I began with a concept of a fractured relationship. Then I thought that not all encounters end in a fracture where one side emerges unscathed; and the other devastated. Below are my steps in designing the scene for "Competition for Affection and Resources".

I used two stable diffusion images from StarryAI.

I included the additional images in my scene Staircase to heaven and Glitter Background before enlisting Canva, my design program, to blend the different type images.

First, I uploaded all images. Next, I added layers of elements in accordance with my upgraded Annual Pro Membership that includes tools to remove backgrounds, resize, filter, duplicate, and reposition items as required. Perhaps of all the tools, the ability to remove backgrounds thereby creating transparencies of the images is crucial to the blending process.

I leave with you my procedures which began with a blank, white canvas.

I share with you my completed design No. 1 for Grappling With Nature:

Thanks for taking the time to view my post. I hope you like my mixed media project series.