Sustained Investigation #11

In my art, you can clearly see a vibrant forest full of life and detail. The story told is this is someone's favorite view from their perspective of this vibrant, colorful forest. I chose to make this because I wanted to create a brighter view of the forest rather than the darker view when you're under the shadows and the sun is in the distance. In this piece, the sun is lighting up almost everything. This relates to my life because I also have a favorite spot down in the woods behind my house where the river flows effortlessly. I wanted to capture how I feel the beauty in a forest would look like in a variety of ways so this perspective in this piece is different from my previous ones. I also find looking off in the distance and seeing nature in a different way as in lighter and smaller appearing is beautiful so I wanted to draw this moment.

My work was made by creating a sketch of the grass and trees in the front then shaping the river around. Next, I drew in little trees in the background and created puff shapes on the top of the trees in the front. Once I was satisfied with the layout of the piece I went in with paper towels and a glue stick. I ripped then layered the paper towels to give them more texture. Once I was done with the placement of the materials I went in with darker green and brown watercolor pens for the trees in the front. I used light green and brown watercolor pens to create the trees in the background to add more depth. I added fog using white acrylic paint to the trees in the background. For the river, I used a mixture of blue watercolor pens and blue acrylic paint. I added white highlights to the middle of the river by using white acrylic paint. I created the rocks in the water with black and grey watercolor pens. I continued building up the darker green below the trees in the front to give them a shadow. I created the tulips by using green watercolor pens for the stems, yellow acrylic paint, and pink watercolor pens for the top of the flowers. I added in little pink and yellow dots in the background to show the depth and distance.

The process of creating my art included quite a bit of layering of the paper towels and of the color. Paper towels content contains trees so I used this related material. My project evolved as I added more shading/shadows and highlights. I noticed that the shading in the front grass and the shading in the water on the edges gave it more detail. The highlights in the water and background gave the art a more realistic look as well. I also added shading to the trees which showed which trees were closer and which were farther. My next steps could be to work on even more layering of materials. I noticed that I liked the look of the green acrylic painted paper towels sticking up off of the paper almost as if it was coming to life. So I want to make the front trees in the future stand out more looking as if you could touch it.