Donate Life

In my art, you can clearly see a bird peacefully soaring through the sky in its natural habitat. The story told is that just like a bird thriving in its environment you can help others soar with organ and tissue donation. I chose to make this because I thought using nature was a great way to portray the beauty in helping others thrive, or soar. Also, there are lots of colors in nature so I took advantage of that and add in lots of bright flowers and a bright sky to give off positive vibes. This relates to my life because I find our earth very beautiful, I love to incorporate nature into all of my artwork. I loved using bright pastel-like colors because it brings me joy just looking at the work. I also find that my flowers in a way represent diversity not only in nature but also in people and to help keep our diversity we donate life.

My work was made by creating a 1-inch border and then drawing the outlines with graphite. I then went in with watercolor and painted green land and added a variety of colorful flowers on top. I added two flowers on each corner/side of the paper to make it look more balanced. I then painted the sun yellow and the sky yellow, orange, and red/pink. I went over the sky with a light blue watercolor to blend the sky together. To make all these colors I took the regular colors and mixed them with white to make them more pastel and bright. I mixed black and brown to create the bird in the center. Then, I went over the flowers with their corresponding colors in pen. I did the same technique with the pen on the grass, bird, and sun. I left the sky to be smooth and softer looking. I then sketched where I wanted my words to be placed. I went over the graphite with multiple layers of a white sharpie and outlined that with a teal-colored pen.

The process of creating my art started with watercolor and then placing the pen on top to bring the work to life with sharper more defined edges. My project evolved as I added more color throughout. I believe the pen adds even more color on top of the watercolor. The sky is by far my favorite part because of how well the colors gently blended together. I also like how the dark pen lines on the watercolor bird added lots of detail and even made it slightly more realistic than I was expecting. My next step could be to keep working with watercolor. I want to start using watercolor and creating the splotchy water look instead of doing layers so the lines aren't present. I also think I want to work with watercolor backgrounds that look messy but the subject of the work is clean and sharp to draw your eyes to it.