Sustained Investigation #9

The phrase that I chose for the inspiration of this piece is "hit the hay." I knew that I wanted there to be a person falling through the hay and sort of floating. I decided to have there be two piles of hay that look like reflections of each other; this split the page in half. Then it made sense to have half be day and half be night because to "hit the hay" means to go to bed, so the person is falling into the night half. This also helped me figure out what clothes she should wear because I'm not used to drawing full people so I wasn't sure what sort of outfit to draw. Once I figured out the full idea, I knew to draw pajamas.

I started by drawing everything in pencil, then I used an eraser to make the hay lighter because I didn't want it to be completely filled in with pencil. Then I used watercolor to add the color to everything. I tried to outline the stars and clouds at first because they were lighter than the rest of the background, but I decided just to paint over them so that the background colors would be even. I though about repainting the whole background with gouache but I ended up just painting the stars and the clouds because I thought that if I painted the whole background with gouache it would stand out more than the things in the foreground. Then I added all of the details and lines in a very thin black pen.

I drew a lot of thin lines with the pen and didn't make them perfect on the night half because I wanted the stars and moon to look more like they were glowing and I wanted to add the effect of motion to the person. These small lines also added more texture. I used different values of blue to create contrast between the day and night halves. By making the hay piles look like reflections of each other I made the drawing more balanced. There are multiple patterns made up of simple shapes like the clouds, the stars, and the dots on the girl's pajama pants. Space is a part of my inquiry question so in this piece I used it effectively by filling the negative space around the girl and the hay in the middle of the paper with those simple patterns. There is emphasis on the girl because she is what stops the two halves of the paper from being symmetrical. One change I made as I was working on the stars was the color I used for them. I painted them white with gouache at first to create unity between them and the clouds, but I didn't like it so I put yellow gouache on top. It was actually good that I put the white first because otherwise the yellow wouldn't have shown up as well on top of the dark blue. My next steps could be to try using darker colors to create more contrast and to find another phrase to illustrate.