Sustained Investigation #4

population decreasing.

25’’x 41’’

Ink, water, block printing

Tigers have always been fascinating to me; they've always been my favorite animal. I wanted to convey the uniqueness of tigers and why their population is decreasing. Watercolor is a medium I don't have much skill in so I decided to try something similar but also different: painting with water and ink. I've seen examples of this before on various art sites but never actually tried it, so I looked it up on Youtube and practiced the technique before I did it on my paper.

I used various colors from Dr. Ph. Martin's Hyrdus watercolor and Bombay India ink such as: black, grass green, 27H Vermillion Hue, 28H Carmine, 29H Crimson Lake, and 26H Chrome Yellow. I also used linoleum and black block printing ink.

My first step was sketching out my tiger with simple light lines. On my practice page, I found that the ink wouldn't cover up the graphite lines, so they had to be very light. Next, I painted over a section with water and then dipped my brush into the color I wanted and brushed it over the water. The ink spread wherever I painted the water, so that was really cool because I could control it more or less. I started out with the lightest orange and then added the darker colors, adding the black stripes last. I really like how the different values/shades of oranges came out on the neck of the tiger. Next I dripped drops of ink and held it horizontally up over the sink, making the drip marks. I also added a little splattering of color around the tiger. I didn't realize that the ink I had on the tiger's eye wasn't dry when I flipped the paper, so it dripped down over the face, making it look almost like a tear in the end, so I'm pleased with how that came out. I had to pick a contrasting color to orange, so green was the perfect match. I dumped a bunch of water onto the background and spread the ink very lightly over it, which was good because I didn't want it to be too dark. As usual, I didn't know what else to do in the background. I've been using text in my past works, so I decided that I would make a print to stamp on. I used Cricut to cut out vinyl stickers to trace a certain font and also the designs of a logging machine and a gun, two things that have to do with what is killing the tigers (population destruction and poaching; poachers use military-grade weapons, so it was important to include that). The letters had to be backwards so they would come out the right when once I printed them. After I printed the text on the paper next to the tiger, there was still a lot of space left, so I added two more prints - not just to fill up space, but also to convey my message.