This creation came as we passed ‘World Turtle Day’. A day which is set on 23rd May every year. As the lockdown, again, continued, artworks began to form around internationally marked days such as ‘World Turtle Day’.
After seeing the promotion of World Turtle Day, it seemed that a turtle would be a nice theme for the next creation. However, once the pencil took to the paper, I’d established that the turtle that I was aiming to draw was in fact a tortoise!
In case you are wondering what the difference is between a turtle and a tortoise – the main difference is that a turtle is mainly marine-based and, therefore, has flippers for feet – making traversing the water a lot easier. A tortoise on the other hand is land-based and, therefore, has feet and lags as most land-based animals and reptiles have.
Why the name, George? Well, like turtles, tortoise numbers are declining in the wild owing to the main reason for hunting for their shell as well as habitat loss. Some might have heard of ‘Lonesome George’ – who was a tortoise that lived on the Galapagos Islands and was the last tortoise of his kind. With that, the tortoise in the piece above was named George.
Whilst the piece was for World Turtle Day, the plight of the tortoise shouldn’t be one that goes unnoticed.
This piece was the first time I had attempted to cast a shadow from the focal object implying where the light source had come from. Whilst there was no sun visible in the creation, the shadow cast by the tortoise brings light into the creation.
This blog post is available in audio as a podcast and can be found here: George, the Tortoise audio
Artwork in Progress 