Sustained Investigation #7

In my art, you can clearly see a green leaf filled dragonfly in the center of water ripples and three brown dragonflies around it. The story told is dragonflies in their natural habitat minding their own business as the water ripples around them. I chose to make this because I was given feedback to start incorporating animals into my work so I decided to try to include insects into artwork. Since the art material has to relate to the piece I used leaves to create the dragonflies. I used tiny green leaves from the front of my house and large brown leaves laying on the ground. I was originally going to use grass but that was a problem once the ground was covered in snow. This relates to my life because I love nature and I find insects very fascinating since they come in many shapes and sizes which is part of the beauty on our earth.

My work was made by sketching out and then cutting out the shape of a dragonfly on a black piece of value paper. I then hot glued a bunch of tiny green leaves onto a white piece of paper. I placed the black dragonfly outline paper on top of the white paper with leaves to make it look like the dragonfly was made up of leaves. I then went in and made sure the papers were hot glued together enough that they wouldn't fall apart. I went in with watercolored pencils and oil pastels in shades of blue and white. I blended with water for the watercolored pencils and then went over with the oil pastels and blended with my finger. I went outside and collected brown leaves and dried them off. I then used scissors and cut them into the shapes of dragonflies. I used hot glue to glue to brown dragonflies around the dragonfly in the center. I also used a white pen to add little highlights and random texture to the dragonflies. In some spots, I like how the hot glue looks like its clear water drops.

The process of creating my art was long since I had to go outside and find the leaves I thought would fit my art best and the placing of the leaves took a while. My project evolved by the amount of color I added to the water and the number of leaves. At first, I only had a thin layer of color for the water ripples so they looked too dark. So I went in and added oil pastels to brighten the piece. The layer of leaves was very small at first and there were pieces of black papers peeking through so I added in more leaves to cover up the patches. My next steps could be to start making the border relate to the work. So I could have vines creeping out of the border or some type of plant. I think this would tie up the piece very nicely. My favorite part of this piece is how creative it is since the leaf process was unique.