Experimenting with expressive lines and marks - Sadness

I chose Sadness as one of my four emotions, I’m not sure why, but I did.

I had difficulty getting myself to feel sad because I’m normally a positive and happy person, and sadness or anger are two emotion which I’m very scared of as I could lose control of myself. I managed to do so after hearing about Charlie Gard on TV, which made me immensely sad.

In the top left corner I used black pastel, my marks were strong and mostly straight, in contrast to the Joy and Calm experiments where I had to force myself to do straight marks.

In the top right corner I used Sepia conté, and this time the marks were even straighter, the feeling was so powerful that I could not even think of making different types of marks.

For the bottom left I used black Indian ink applied with a wooden stick and the marks are thinner and more curved, but having started from the left centre I could see the lines vanishing when they reached the end of the mark. Following my emotions I did some small marks in the centre, which also gave me the idea that something was disappearing.

For the bottom right I used acrylic marker pen, starting from left to right, and once again as in the adjacent experiment there is a sense of the lines vanishing on the paper.