Sustained Investigation #15

This piece was based off of the phrase "cat got your tongue?" So I drew a person looking pretty shocked as a cat is holding onto her tongue and someone is asking her why she isn't talking. A lot of the time the next thing that person would ask is if a cat got her tongue. In this case a cat actually has her tongue. I also added the detail of spots on the cat's fur spelling out "be quiet" to add to the whole idea of the girl being unable to speak. The lines around her add to her surprised expression and show how she feels being put on the spot when she can't say anything.

The materials that I used for this piece were gouache, pen, and watercolor. I used some red watercolor first on top of the pencil sketch to show where the shadows would be and to have a color to start with. I did this with my last gouache piece and I really liked how it worked. That was the piece based off of "frog in the throat" and it is pretty similar to this one because of the facial expressions and use of text in both. I chose to use gouache because I enjoyed using it for that piece and wanted more practice with using it for portraits. The problem with the other piece I used gouache for was that there wasn't a lot of contrast and all the colors were really light so for this one I made sure to choose some darker colors and then I used a black pen for the lines instead of paint. Then I used blue pen for the lines in the background because I didn't want it to blend in with the lines on the rest of the drawing.

There is some contrast between the top and bottom halves of the piece because there is a pattern in the background of the top half but the bottom half is just the solid color of the table that the cat is sitting on. I also tried to make the perspective more interesting with the way I drew the cat's tail. The pen that I used for the lines adds texture especially in the background because those lines are kind of messy. When choosing the colors I decided to make the background and the table different values of yellow so that there was some unity between them. This also makes the orange on the cat fit better because yellow and orange are both warm colors. I chose blue for the shirt, the eyes, and the lines in the background because I also wanted to include a cool color to go with the darker colors that I used for the hair and the lines. The lines in the background help to fill the negative space and put emphasis on the girl's surprised expression. This project evolved when I was drawing on top of the gouache with pen because at first I wasn't going to outline the spots on the cat but I changed my mind because I wanted the words to stand out a little more. I also wasn't going to draw the shadows on the girls face in pen but I liked how it look in the pencil drawing so I did it in pen too. At first I didn't like how it looked but now I think it goes well with the style of the drawing and the messiness of the lines around her. My next steps could be to try doing a painting with colors that make it so there is enough contrast without drawing on top with pen.