Find Your Voice

For this project, we were first assigned to choose a topic that is important to us. The list had topics from climate change to women's rights. I chose water pollution because I care a lot about how we treat marine animals. I wanted to do something simple but effective and I knew that I wanted to incorporate a turtle somehow because they are the most widely talked about due to the issue surrounding plastic bags and straws. At first my plan was to have a drop of clean water in the middle of the paper and have the hands/fins of a lot of different marine animals reaching for it, but I didn't know how to make them look really realistic so you could tell what the animal was. Because I immediately thought of turtles, I knew that I wanted to stick to the idea of turtles, so I decided to change my design plan a little bit. I decided to still do the single drop of clean water but make it bigger so that it took up most of the paper. Then I thought of drawing a big turtle in the drop of clean water but I wanted it to not be able to fit in the drop of water to portray how there isn't enough clean water for marine animals to survive. I started by drawing out my design with graphite. Then I started painting the turtle. I mixed green, blue, yellow, and a little brown to make the dark green turtle color. I knew that I wanted to make the shell have a lot of values of green to make it look realistic, so I tried not to mix the paints completely together so that there would be streaks of the different colors. When I was done painting the shell, head, and fins of the turtle, I darkened the green I had previously made and used that to outline the different parts. This made the turtle seem a little more animated, which I ended up really liking. When I was done painting the turtle, I moved on to painting the background blue. I wanted to make sure the blue was really solid and bright so that it would represent clean water, so I made sure not to mix the original blue paint with anything. Now that I have finished my project, I realize that I can add more to the background to make the piece stronger. I got recommendations to put trash in the background and possibly do that by glueing actual trash to it. I might go back and do that in the future, but for now I like the simplicity of my piece, and I think it effectively portrays the social issue I was trying to address.