Sustained Investigation #10

Artist Statement

This art work was inspired by an earlier piece in my sustained investigation call Public Transportation. In that piece I drew a girl sitting in between two skeletons on a train. I decided to expand upon that idea of a girl living in a world of skeletons and this time I chose a skeleton dinner party as a situation where the girl is out of place. I also inverted the colors from the other piece by having the girl be the only one who is colorful. I was inspired by the expressionist art style because expressionism often focuses on showing anxiety which was the feeling I wanted to represent. Expressionist art also used lots of bold colors to express the subject's emotions. There are multiple elements emphasizing the fact that the girl is feeling out of place including the fact that she is in color, she is underdressed for the occasion, no one is sitting across from her, and she is not a skeleton.

For materials I used watercolor, ink, and colored pencil on watercolor paper. I drew the whole image in pencil first and then went over the lines with a black fine point pen. Then I painted everything except the girl with gray watercolors. I did a lot of layers to darken the shadows while leaving some places lighter. Then I did one final layer over everything except for the parts that the ceiling light was lighting up. For the girl I used colored pencils and I blended them together a lot to make her stand out from the neat lines and solid colors in the rest of the painting. I used lots of red on her face because anxiety can often make peoples' faces go red. I also used the fine point pen to define her facial features better.

The most difficult part of drawing this was figuring out the perspective and the arrangement of all the skeletons. I didn't really have a reference image to work from so I was kind of making up the details as I went from the image I had in my head. I was able to create the general idea pretty well in the thumbnail sketch but in the final piece I had to figure out a lot more details like the place settings and making the skulls look semi anatomically correct. I did some research for the skeletons by looking up pictures of skulls at different angles and then using those as references for each skeleton based on where they were sitting. At first I wasn't going to show lighting because I find it difficult, but I'm glad I did because I think it makes the composition of the piece stronger.