Lines: 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.