Cara Drook

For my Sustained Investigation I wanted to answer the question of how one can encompass the beauty of a region's flora and fauna through illustration. Nature is something I have always adored. My earliest memory is of me hoisting a set of twigs above my head so I could pretend to be a deer in the woods. My goal for all of my pieces is that they project my eternal love for the natural world.

I wanted my work to show the cohesion and bonds all forms of life hold in the natural world. By researching specific habitats, I was able to select the elements of a region to contribute to my drawings. At the beginning of the year I used strictly pen and ink and I focused mainly on one animal such as a deer or seal, and incorporated its whole habitat into the image. However, as the year went on, I began to experiment with color by adding either water color or an acrylic wash to parts of my pen and ink drawings. At that time I also began to work on smaller pieces with more literal imagery in hopes of creating more realistic pieces. After completing ⅔ of my SI in pen I decided to switch mediums and try colored pencil. With colored pencil I was able to focus on displaying the rich colors that saturate nature.