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All bodies are beautiful
By Reese Snow
By Reese Snow
For my independent project, I made three acrylic paintings, each of these paintings are of plus size women with different skin tones and with flowers replacing their faces. Each of these flowers have symbolism behind them, the orange lily is confidence, the sunflower is strength and the last flower, the narcissus flower, is for self love. What inspired me to create these paintings was to show more representation for bigger bodies since the ‘beauty standard’ for women is to be thin, slim figure etc. These paintings mean a lot to me because growing up and hearing these things and seeing it all over social media and Tv can really affect you and put an image in your head that if you don't fit in with the ‘beauty standard’ then you're not pretty or worthly. With these paintings I wanted to show that it is okay to be bigger and how no matter what is on social media or what other people think, all bodies are beautiful, and they should be recognized. Some of the challenges I faced when creating these paintings was trying to get the shading and highlighting right on the flowers and bodies. I overcame these by looking at my reference photos and my friends were also encouraging me the whole time with compliments about my paintings, I also asked for feedback to see if I could do anything different for parts I was stuck on. Over all, I love how all the colors came out and how the bodies and the poses they are doing came out. What I could have done better is making better, finer lines, but I do believe with more practice with acrylic paints, I will get better! I learned a lot during this assignment, like how to shade better, how to blend colors better, I definitely learned more about the anatomy of the human body and a lot more about perspective and angle in painting. This was such an amazing experience and I'm really proud of how my art has progressed and improved this year in VAM and how it shows in these paintings.