Sustained Investigation #13

In my art, you can clearly see a beautiful hidden view of mountains and forest tops as the water flows, connecting the two. The story told is this view is a secret to someone and they come here to relax and feel as though they're on top of the world. The view itself has the treetops, mountain tops, birds high in the sky, and a river. I chose to make this because I find all of these parts of nature important when showing the beauty of forests. In this case, the beauty of the top of the forests is shown from the point of view where the person is looking from inside a forest so there are larger trees close up. I did this in order to change the perspective rather than creating a similar scene over and over again. This relates to my life because I find all nature beautiful and everyone should have a secret view that brings back positive memories. I know if I had a view similar to this by my house I would visit it every day to destress.

My work was made by creating a sketch in order to get the placement of the trees and mountains correct. I then used a green colored pencil to color the closer trees in the front. I didn't like the look of just colored pencil so I decided to paint over it with different shades of green acrylic paint. I used a smaller brush for the closer up trees to add in lots of tiny details. I used a medium-sized brush to dab my paper with paint in quick up and down motions. I repeated this step with multiple different green colors. I made the trees that are farther away lighter and the closer trees are darker. In order to have a material that relates I used a clear glue stick and glued moss to the bottom of this piece. I continued layering the moss on top of each other in order to have lots of texture. I also glued a lot of layers of paper towels to the small cliff that is at the "end" of the river. This helped to give this art piece more detail, texture, and depth. It was harder to make the cliff look like a cliff so by adding a paper towel it bumped up the cliff making it look more realistic.

The process of creating my art involved a lot of up and down quick movements of the brush to get the strokes and texture appearance that I wanted. My project evolved the more and more I added different shadows and highlights. It also evolved the more layers of moss I glued onto the paper and then layered different shades of green on top. My next steps could be to work on having views that are a different perspective. I also want to create art that's different sizes. So I want to make art pieces that are either larger or much smaller. This way I can experiment on what size art I truly like. I also want to collect more materials to add to my art. So now that the snow is melting I can add real grass to parts of my work that involves grass. Lastly, I want to include more happening in my art. What I mean by this is adding more beauty such as a variety of flowers, mountains, different types of trees, etc.