12. Scholastic #4

Artist Statement

The fourth piece in our assigned scholastic prompt, I returned to my focus of crows for this one. With the pieces that I've completed before this being more fantasy-like, I decided the scene for this piece would be more realistic in the setting. Growing up on farmlands here in Maine, during the harvest season crows were a common sight in the skies and down on the fields. Natural scavengers, I decided that scholastic four would focus on that—showing a scene of a crow eating a fallen piece of corn.

The materials that I used were watercolor, colored pencils, and ink. Watercolor starting as my base, I used the color pencil to bring out the saturation and the pen to highlight details and finalize the forms in the piece.

For this piece, I actually struggled the most with the coloring. Originally the background was going to be a solid blue with a horizon line and the corn was going to be plain yellow. But after finishing the background I didn't like how plain it looked. Going back to the drawing board, I was hesitant at first to add a more complex background as I already marked up the piece pretty bad. But deciding to do it anyways, I was pleasantly surprised with how it came out. This decision spurring me to change the corn to multi-colored, I'm glad I made these choices.

Overall I believe this piece is finished. Even though there are some things that I wish I could change about the piece, I don't think it would be wise to go back in with how many layers are already incorporated. Because of that, and the final product, I'm happy with this finished product.