Sustained Investigation #12

Artist Statement

The inspiration for this artwork came from the phrase "fish out of water" meaning someone who is outside of their usual environment or activities. I was drawing what first came to mind when I heard this phrase in my sketchbook. I ended up with a drawing of some fish sitting on flowers. I really liked how it looked so I redrew it digitally and added some more details to make it into a finished piece.

This work was made digitally. I started out with the dry ink brush and did a pretty messy drawing to figure out where all the flowers would go. Then, instead of going over that drawing on another layer, I cleaned up the original lines which I think made them look a lot better and more fluid. To color the drawing I created a new layer underneath the line art and colored in the flowers first. From there I chose the rest of the colors and made sure they went well together. I chose more muted colors for the background because I wanted the flowers to stand out more. After I did the flat colors, I added some more opaque yellow tones over them to show that there was a light source. I used some different values of green in the grass to give it more depth. I colored the fish blue because I wanted the cool color to stand out against the warm yellow of the flowers but I still wanted the fish to be kind of colorful.

I went through a few other ideas before coming back to this one because I wanted to think of something that made more sense or took my sustained investigation further. I ended up coming back to this idea because it was the only one the I could fully visualize and would have fun drawing. That is how I've decided on ideas for most of this sustained investigation because when I have fun creating the pieces, it shows in the final product. I didn't use any reference picture so the fish are very simple and so is the environment because they came from my imagination.