"Egg, nest, house, country and universe"

This is my submission for the latest exhibition at Camberwell, jointed curated by MA Drawing and MA Designer-Maker (nope, I've no idea either...). I had some fun with this one! The theme for the exhibition is "Egg, nest, house, country and universe", a Victor Hugo quote, taken from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space.

I played around with a few different ideas to begin with, trying to include all the elements of the quote, before deciding to focus on just egg, country and universe – although it could be argued that there are probably lots of houses and nests populating the Earth being cracked open.

I found the space background from doing a search online, and adjusted the levels and colours, and added a colour halftone screen to give the appearance of it being viewed on a monitor (and to hide the fact that the image was low resolution). I did numerous sketches to get the hands right, photographing my own hands for reference, and looked online for references of an egg breaking and the yolk falling. My initial idea just had an image of an egg being broken in space, but while working on it, I developed the idea so that the "egg" was the Earth, which I like.

I coloured the image using a combination of colour pencil, felt pen and some Photoshop work. I am very happy with the final work!