Sustained Investigation #11

Along my many journeys at Alzar, we had expedition blocks that lasted for two weeks straight in the wilderness. While in Parque Patagonia in Chile, we hiked to a glacial lake that was around 10 miles from our camp, and I was struck by its beauty. Seeing this, I took the opportunity to express my investigation and link this experience with skateboarding. I chose to make this art because this experience was one that stuck with me from my trip.

This was made by cutting the shape of the skateboard out of a piece of poplar wood, from a design that I made myself a year or two ago. Then I began to sand it to refine the shape and bevel the edges of the board all around. Using skateboard trucks I lined them up on the board and centered them to the center line, and proceeded to drill the holes making sure to counter sink for the bolts. Then I started painting with a blue wash to show the grain through and began to build up the layers with different tones and highlights off of my memory of the lake. I went from the back with the mountains and moved forwards towards the foreground. To finish it off and make it look more clean, I added a black border all around and signed the bottom of it.

In this artwork, I used color in all of the colors I mixed together to get the image I was looking for and value in all of the different values of the colors I made to get shadows and highlights. My project evolved because although I knew how I was going to mainly set up the artwork, I didn't sketch it out, so there are things the didn't turn out how I thought, but for the most part, it did. Next time, I could try to add more detail into the pieces, or make them more realistic looking.