The Leshy, The Spirits Of Nature
The inspiration behind the start of my project was from the fictional fantasy series The Witcher (2019) and the Slavic mythology that is incorporated into the series. This led me to research about fine artists that have work based on Slavic mythology because of this I found an artist Jelena Matejic who has a whole exhibition based on Slavic mythology on her website.
This research helped me decide on the Slavic mythology creature I was going to create known as the Leshy or Leshen, this creature is a guardian of the forest and spirit of the forest. I decided to create this creature from my Special Effects project and create a clay sculpt of a Leshy.
For my Fine Art project, I decided to look more into the realism of the leshy This led me to research about types of trees I also explored local areas with different trees and the foliage on the trees. This inspired me to do an A3 canvas acrylic painting of tree bark from a photograph I took, I also decided to do dry etching of my sketches to go along with the canvas.
Other research I did for my project was the Fibonacci spiral and how the spiral is incorporated into nature and the detail on different types of trees such as oak trees, willow trees, cherry blossom trees and birch trees. I also looked into the detail of the foliage on the trees such as mushrooms, moss and leaves. The mystery of the physiology behind nature was what inspired me to create these projects and was why I incorporated the tree of life cycle to my project.
This work is displayed in the university’s art exhibition …
