After working on the plastic bag with water and the goldfish paintings, I wanted to continue working on realism. I think that finding prompts with heavy topics has helped me grow as an artist. It gives me a chance to dive deep into what these prompts could potentially mean. In this case, I chose decay. Originally I was going to paint a pig body decaying, but I decided to focus more on what gets attracted to decay, which lead me to paint a fly. When I think of a fly, I think of rot, decay, death, etc. But decay can mean a lot of things; in this case, I focused on how a fly can symbolize a person rotting, becoming a bad person, or just decaying. It was difficult to figure out highlights and how to paint the wings, but I think for a third-first realism painting it turned out pretty good!
Aside from the fly, there's the face on the back of the canvas that was made by smudging the pallet and using my finger to move things around how I wanted. I'd like to say that this is the person the fly is aching to land on. There are no progress photos since this fly was made in about an hour and a half, somewhat similar to the plastic bag with water and goldfish paintings.