Outcome

For my dichotomy I chose singularity vs. juxtaposition, and my visual metaphor for nature is the sweet gumball, a spiky seed pod from a certain kind of tree.

In the first piece, for singularity, I chose to center the composition around the most readily apparent aspect of sweet gumballs: their spikiness. I used triangles to roughly convey the points of a single gumball. Using triangles rather than the ready-made "star" resulted in a less even, measured look, which is successful because it seems both more natural (evoking nature, the prompt) and more "jagged" (evoking sharpness, like spikiness). I think the composition overall works because literally every visual element is a pointy, straight-lined triangle, making it overall very singular yet still recognizable as a gumball.

In the second piece, I wanted to juxtapose the spikiness with roundness. I chose a closeup to get a broad, soft curve from the side of the gumball, and find slight curves in even the spiky points. The openings for seeds (gumballs are seed pods) were also somewhat spiky yet round, so I combined both elements in their representation. The spikiness is still present in that the spikes are still quite prominent and quite pointy. I think this composition was fairly successful, if a bit simple for only having a couple pairs of juxtaposed elements. I could have included the stem, which would be a curve, but I couldn't think of another pointy aspect to balance it.

Overall, I had trouble in that the awful free drawing program on my laptop offers exactly 4 shades of brown, only 3 of which were actually close to what I needed.