Color Project -- In Progress

For our Color Project, there were three themes; explore, creature, and disguise.  I combined 'explore' and 'creature,' and have decided to draw a sea monster with a globe in its eye.  Instead of having sea monsters on the map, like 'here thar be monsters,' I have a map on a monster.

     I'm doing this in oil pastel, because I wanted to sea monster to look a little wet and shiny. That's not really happening, though, because I'm smudging the oil pastel to such an extreme degree to blend all the color together.  It does produce a cool effect overall, though.  I'm glad I didn't chose watercolors, because that doesn't really make something look wet, it just makes something look watery.  

     One thing that annoys me is that I like my rough drafts better than I like my final draft.  The proportions of the eye changed in every rendering, so in the first draft the sea monster had a really large eye and looked a bit like Toothless from "How To Train Your Dragon," but in my final the eye is pretty proportionate. Also, my final draft looks a lot like Christopher Paolini's drawing of Firnir on the front of "Inheritance," which sort of annoys me, because I'm supposed to be drawing a sea monster, not a dragon.  But, I used his work as reference.  So, I like my second draft the best of all my drafts.  I think that that's the best one, and I wish that it was big enough to use on my final project.

     I cut out my final sea monster and pasted it onto a light blue piece of construction paper. I'm going to color the blue in with a darker blue oil pastel, and then smudge that, and then add in other colors. So, it will look sort of messy, but hopefully it will communicate the idea that my sea monster is underwater.  I also messed up on the eye.  I didn't want the colors to be too vibrant, sort of brown and yellowed like an old map, but that wasn't really possible with oil pastels, because the pigment is too bright.

This is my first draft.

Halfway through my second draft. 

 I could not get them to flip on their sides, I apologize.

These are pictures of my second draft, colored in.

 So, this is my project so far!  Hopefully, it will only look better as time goes on.  

Two-In-One Final

This is my finished project; I think this picture is a bit too small to legibly read the writing, but you can sort of see where the letters stick out into the white space.  Overall, I think I was pretty successful in my attempt to portray my idea, and it looks much better than what I originally had in mind, which was turning the wings of a butterfly into the pages of a book.  This looks simpler but still has the same core idea.
     I am most proud of the bottom wings.  Most people notice the bigger top wings, or, at least, I usually do, but in drawing this butterfly I actually noticed the patterns on the bottom set of wings.  I think they are the best part of the entire drawing.  I also like how the black is so small that the words stick over the edge, so it looks like the black is actually made of the words, which was my original idea, before I realized that there would be too many white spaces if I did that for the tips of the wings. I also--and this has nothing to do with my drawing--just like the lines on the bottom wing, how they all connect to one, which swoops upward.  Because of that, I think I paid more attention to this section, which leads me to be more proud of it.
     If I could change anything, I would change the wings.  I am a perfectionist and I am obsessed with symmetry, to an unhealthy level, and even though I know that a butterfly's wings aren't exactly symmetrical in the flesh, it annoys me that on the right wing the bar between the orange spaces is bigger than it is on the right wing. Also, the black wing tips aren't so large in real life in comparison to the wings themselves.
     If we did this with color, I would have done watercolor orange around the edges of the butterfly, so it would've been a black-and-white monarch butterfly against the orange background. To sort of mix things up a bit.  
     I've incorporated the theme Two-In-One into this drawing by writing Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" outlining the black on the butterfly (I think I wrote the poem a total of four and half times around the edges of the butterfly).  I don't know if this is strictly 'two-in-one,' because my picture doesn't morph or compare the shapes of two separate items by combining them into one, but it contains two elements of art in one. The art of words and the art of nature.
      Maybe I should call it 'Message On Wings.'  But, maybe that would be a little cheesy.

                                                 Adios!

Two In One -- In Progress

For my Two In One project, I am drawing a monarch butterfly with Robert Frost's "A Road Not Taken" written on its veins and on the edges of its wings--basically, a line of text in place of any definitive line on the butterfly. I am doing this piece in pencil, and I briefly thought about writing the words in pen, but it would've made the poem stand out over the butterfly, and I wanted the words to become part of the butterfly.
     Originally, I thought that I would write the poem only on the veins in the butterfly's wings, which would then appear to be a book, thus creating a two-in-one, but after looking at the shape of the butterfly and the position of the visible veins on the wing I decided that would look a bit cheesy.  So, my Two-In-One is less of a visual two-in-one and more of a conceptual two-in-one, I guess.
      One of the most problematic things that have come u in my creation of this project is the proportions of the butterfly.  I choose to do this project on a large piece of paper (I am not sure of the dimensions, but it's a large rectangle), with the butterfly's body a bit off-center. My wings were then drawn, and I found the right wing to be a foot in length.  When I drew the left wing a foot in length, it disappeared off the side of the paper.  I believe that I will keep the butterfly in its same position and have it go off the page a bit, but I don't know how proportionate the wings are to the body.  I believe it might be too small, but if I change the body then I would have to change the wings.  I'm going to attempt to find some way to alter the body without altering the wings too drastically, because I like the symmetry of the wings as they are.
      Also, the pencil is showing out to be a bit scratchy.  Hopefully I'll be able to smooth the shaded areas with smudging, but I'll have to figure out a way to get a dark, smooth area without using the tip of my pencil.
     For the white spots on the butterfly's wings, I'm going to be erasing, so they'll be gray, not white.  I won't do words around them because they would be really cramped and I want the poem to be legible.

   

This is the image I am basing my butterfly off of.

                            Ciao!