Sustained investigation #8

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 would always camp outside in tents without floors called mids. This experience of staying in mids, while it was a pain when it got windy, stuck with me because every day we would wake up and fall asleep looking at mountains like these. 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 how the mountains often looked. I went from the back with the mountains and slowly tried to make it into the trees. 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. I used texture and form in the mountains because I used ripped paper to make the jagged mountain lines Patagonia is known for. 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 make the mountains, or really anything, that is far in the back of the artwork lighter to make it more realistic. I would also add more texture to the mountains.