Sustained Investigation #13

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, there was one day where one of my good friends (from Alzar) and I went off for hours just running through the woods and eventually we found a giant cow skull. 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 just recently, and it is a bit shorter due to my abundance of wood. 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 green wash to show the grain through and began to build up the layers with different tones and highlights off of my memory of how the skull looked along with some assistance from google images. I went from the back with the grass and slowly moved up to the skull using a lot of white and tan tones. 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 in the skull. 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. Next time, I think I would add flowers in and around the skull to add some interest and color to the piece.