Sustained Investigation #5

Artist Statement

I have heard people refer to snakes as "danger noodles" before so for this piece I decided to put a "danger noodle" in with spaghetti noodles because they are similar but the snake it obviously the one out of place. It's like a worse version of having a fly in your soup. I drew the snake's tail wrapping around the fork and a garnish from the spaghetti on it's head to make the snake look like it is interacting with the plate of spaghetti instead of just being placed on top.

The materials I used for this piece are colored pencils and graphite. I drew on smooth bristol paper because when I used those materials on watercolor paper it was too textured and left lots of white spots which I didn't want for this drawing. I started with a light pencil sketch and used a ruler for the tablecloth in the background. Then I started coloring in the table cloth. I was originally going to color some squares red and leave the other ones white but when I did that it looked like the background was unfinished so I went over the white squares very lightly with the red colored pencil. Then I went over the lines of the spaghetti noodles with a brown colored pencil and colored them with yellow. Then I went back with the brown colored pencil to add more shading and depth to the pasta and darken the lines. You can see in the progress picture I included what the noodles looked like when I had only done this to part of them. I used graphite and some blue colored pencil on the plate around the spaghetti. Then I colored the sauce and the meatballs with multiple layers of browns and reds to get the right colors. Then I drew the snake with graphite going over the lines a few time to darken them so the snake would stand out. The last thing I did was use brown colored pencil to add shadows around the plate and the snake.

I experimented with how to used colored pencils in a more stylized way and to get the right colors with them. I used lots of pattern in this drawing on the tablecloth, the spaghetti, and the snake. I used value in the spaghetti to add depth. The spaghetti is made up of a lot of lines which I think are interesting to look at. I drew the snake just using graphite because I wanted to create contrast between the colorful plate of spaghetti and the grey values on the snake. There is some blue in the plate so that it wouldn't completely match the snake and it would still be clear that the snake is out of place through the use of materials. My project evolved from the sketchbook page where I put my ideas because in the thumbnail I didn't use a reference image for the snake so the pose was different. I was also planning on using ink for the snake to make it standout but I decided not to do that because I still wanted it to look like it belonged in the drawing, it just has to be out of place in the environment. I also added an extra garnish to the pasta because I didn't want it to look like the snake just had a random leaf on its head. My next steps could be to create piece with materials that have a more obvious contrast between them.