Sustained Investigation #14

Artist Statement

The main idea behind this painting is that the real goldfish is out of place in a bag of goldfish crackers. I got the idea because I was eating goldfish crackers while trying to think of situations that show the feeling of being out of place. I also wanted part of the piece to be observational like I did with the painting of a cell phone in a bunch of bananas. I set up the bag on my desk with goldfish cracker spilling out and painted that part from observation. I used reference images online to add in the real goldfish.

I started this artwork with a pencil drawing of the bag and the goldfish before drawing the real goldfish in the middle of the crackers. I went over the whole thing with a layer of pink watercolor just to cover the white paper and put a warm color in the background. Then I used gouache to paint the bag and all of the goldfish crackers. I did a couple layers of different oranges on the goldfish to make them look a little more three dimensional and then outline them so they would stand out from the background. I chose light blue for the background because I liked how the color looked with the orange on the bag and the goldfish. After I painted all the crackers, I painted the real goldfish with gouache and added details in colored pencil. I also added some shadows to show where the light source was since my desk lamp was to the right of the bag.

I practiced drawing the bag and goldfish once in my sketchbook to figure out how I wanted the final piece to look. I also drew one of the goldfish crackers to practice drawing the basic shape since I had to draw so many of them. I rearranged some of the crackers in a way that would use up more of the paper and have some of them be cut off by the border. I also did some research to figure out the colors and shape of the real goldfish using reference pictures.