Sustained Investigation #13

My inquiry question is "how can I illustrate phrases inspired by nature using space?" The phrase that I chose as the inspiration for this piece is "frog in the throat." To show this I drew a portrait of an old lady yawning and then added a close up of her mouth so that you can see the frog in her throat more clearly. I connected the two images with the word yawn to show that she is yawning and not just opening her mouth for no reason. I also made her eyes look tired to add to the idea that she is yawning. The border is a squiggly line connected to the word yawn as a way to include it better and use the space on the paper in a different way. The lady is also wearing lily pad earrings to add to the frog theme

The materials I used for this painting were gouache, watercolor, and colored pencil. I did the first sketch in pencil and then used a light layer of reddish brown watercolor to show where the shadows would go and to have a base color before I added the actual colors in gouache. I started with the light green background. Then I did a lot of layers of gouache for the skin and added darker colors as I went. I put the darkest color on in thin lines for the details around the eyes and nose. Then I did the same for the grey hair. I had trouble creating contrast because my color choices were very light so I just outlined the hair and the face in the darkest values of those colors. I used lots of values of greens and yellows on the frog to show highlights and shadows and then used a very dark green for the outline and the details. For the word yawn I tried to use dark green gouache but it was really difficult to make the lines look good with a paintbrush so I ended up going over it with green colored pencil.

I don't usually use paint for portraits so a process I experimented with when creating this work of art was figuring out how to make and blend skin tones with the gouache. I had trouble thinking of an idea for this phrase but I knew I wanted to use it because I have been enjoying drawing frogs recently and wanted to be able to include one in my sustained investigation. After drawing a couple thumbnails that I didn't like in my sketchbook I took a break to just draw some random frogs. After I drew a couple frogs I started a new page and the first thing I drew was the idea I ended up using. Then my project evolved as I took that idea and developed it further by adding things like the lily pad earrings and the word "yawn." The squiggly borders of both images connecting to the word is how I added unity. There is more emphasis on the frog in the image on the right because it is larger and I used brighter colors for it than I did for the frog on the left. By using lots of values of grey in the hair I added texture. My use of color adds the general idea behind the piece because the background is green and the phrase includes frogs. My next steps could be to use darker colors and add more contrast in the next work of art because I tried to add more contrast to this painting but the colors I chose made that very difficult.