Arrive Alive

In my art, you can clearly see a car accident that happened at night and there are police lights along with lots of other bright colors in the background. The story told is a cat was driving a car at night while being distracted by alcohol and a phone, which ended in a bad car accident with someone else. I chose to make this because I love my cat very much so I want to portray a powerful message using cats. I chose to make the cat a calico cat because I didn't want the race to play a role in this distracted driving, so the cat is a variety of colors. This relates to my life because when I decided to draw this cat-themed work, I didn't know how to have my artwork and text match. But then as I was starring at my cat I realized I could use the saying about nine lives to portray a stronger message.

My work was made by creating a sketch on a piece of paper and then uploading the photo to a digital art app on my phone. I then used a stylus and began adding in all the basic colors. So the cars were silver and the other was blue. Then I went in with dark grey lines to show the crushed and damaged parts of the car. My favorite part of drawing the cars was the shattered glass. I sued a variety of zig-zag and straight brush strokes alternating between blue, grey, and white. Whenever I felt a line looked too sharp I would use the blur tool to blend it out more. To add shading around this piece I would lighten the transparency of the black and that way the other colors would slightly show through, appearing like a real shadow. I added a phone with light shining on the cat's face and alcohol in the cat's other hand to show distracted driving. I think the text shaped, style, and meaning is strong in this piece. I chose to make it yellow in order for it to pop more. I made the sky night time but still a pinkish and purple-ish colorful sky with stars. I didn't want to add too much detail so instead of having detailed trees I just made them silhouettes.

The process of creating my art involved a lot of zooming in touch up tiny details. Often times I would accidentally overlap a color that shouldn't have been overlapped and find it later in the process. My project evolved the most when I was adding shading to the car mirror, car shadows, car part's shadows, and guard rail shadow. Adding the yellow text underlined in white stars was the final touch. One of the other last steps was adding the police cars to give off that more dramatic, real effect. My next step could be to continue to experiment with digital art. I didn't realize how much easier digital art is when you upload a sketch first rather than free handing. I think for my senior project I may consider using digital art instead of paint. Or I may decide to do a mixture. But I learned a lot from digital art and I have definitely grown more fond of it.