Russian Famine 1921 Painting

After that drawing all inspired from the Russian Famine of 1921 and that final drawing came out, I decided to paint it. And not to brag, but I'm kind of stoked about it. Its on a piece of crappy wood, that I spilled oil on, and its all warped and this isn't not a very good picture of it, but I'm happy with it. Plus was suppose to be a sketch painting, but I got more caught up in it than I had planned on.

Materials: Oil paint on wood

Russian Famine of 1921

I was recently reading about the Russian Famine of 1921 and this idea came about. In the simplest explanation the Russian famine was caused by a drought in the 1920's and roughly 5 million people died.

The top image is a map of Russia, clearly not a perfect map but it was drawn from a map of Russia. Then I took a a sheet of tracing paper and drew the image of below on the left. It was this idea of the weighted atmosphere swarming the land (a.k.a. the famine). Within those lines I then found my figures, drawn on another piece of tracing paper. People who were forced to adjust to the circumstances and were affected by it. The next row down and first image on the left is another sheet of tracing paper. On that sheet, I found text within those lines. The words I found were 5 million, famine, Russia, and drought. And lastly, I took another sheet of tracing paper and over laid it on again and designed one final image, influenced by all the other layers.

Materials: paper, tracing paper, pen