Sustained Investigation #16

This drawing was based off of the word cliffhanger. A cliffhanger is when a story ends leaving the audience in suspense so to make it clear that this is what I was illustrating, I put a bunch of pages on a cliff and the part of the cliff that the person is hanging off of has a page that says "THE END" on it. This shows that the person has reached the end of the story but the ending was a cliffhanger. There is another cliff in the background with pages on it to balance the drawing out and to suggest other stories that ended this way. The sunset also adds to the idea of an ending.

I decided to this drawing digitally using the app Procreate on my iPad because it is easier to adjust the pose of the figure without messing up the whole drawing and I had never drawn a pose like that before. I also wanted to use colors that looked nice together and it was easier to choose these colors digitally.

I chose almost all warm colors because I wanted the sky to be yellow like a sunset and the cliffs to be red because I think it looks nicer and more imaginative than realistic colors like a blue sky and brown cliffs with green grass on them would look. I chose blue for the person to create contrast between the figure and the background and make them stand out more. I also outlined the clouds in a light blue so that the person wasn't the only part of the drawing where there was a cool color. There aren't really any details on the person because I didn't want to give them a specific appearance so that they could represent anyone who has read this cliffhanger. The whole drawing is made up of pretty simple shapes so the appearance of the person just sort of goes along with this style. Most of the colors are just flat colors and I added darker values of red and yellow to show shadows on the cliff and where the sky gets darker. The outline of the cliffs split up the page diagonally and the clouds help to balance out these two halves. There are a few different patterns in this drawing including the clouds, the pages, and the squiggly lines on the pages that are supposed to represent words. There is emphasis on the words "the end" because they are much larger than the rest of the "words" on the pages. The cliff that the last page is on also goes further out that the other parts of the cliff. One way that my project evolved was from the thumbnail to the first sketch because in the thumbnail drawing I had the words written directly on the cliff, but when I did the first sketch I decided that it would look better to have a bunch of pages sitting on the cliff. My next steps could be to try using colors that go together well with traditional materials like I did digitally in this drawing.