Creative Color Animal

This is my creative color animal project. The objective of this project was to use our observational skills again to make an animal. However, this time it wasn't blind contour or anything else besides pure observation. I chose to use a polar bear because I had previously experimented with animals that were fairly small, and I wanted to give the sort of basic shape of the bear a try. I decided to do the drawing on a really large piece of paper because it's been a long time since I've done a really big piece, so I wanted to have some fun with it.

The other part of this project was that we had to play with color in our animals. When I first saw the polar bear, I immediately thought of somewhere north, like Canada and Alaska and obviously the North Pole. I didn't just want to make the bear random colors all around, because I really like making full pieces that have a type of message/main idea. My idea was to go for an Alaskan sky, and have the polar bear be a part of that sky. So, for the color part of the project, I chose to have the bear represent the majority of the color. However, the colors come in the form of the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis. I've always been fascinated by the Northern Lights and love the aesthetic that comes with the neon blues, greens, and purples that pop against the dark night sky.

I made the bear and the lights out of water color paint, because I figured that would be the easiest paint that would give me the half-blended effect that I was going for. I also chose to make the sky out of really dark purple and blue water color because I thought that it would be easier to blend to make an even, inky night sky. I then went in with a large paintbrush covered in watered-down white acrylic paint and splattered stars onto the background, making sure not to get too much on the bear. After all of this was done, I didn't like how the bear's legs awkwardly cut off at the bottom of the page, so I decided to add a dark treeline to get rid of the awkward cut-off and hopefully provided some more contrast against the white stars and bright Northern Lights.