Environmental Postcards

This is my environmental project. The purpose of this project was to create something that could raise awareness for an issue that we see in out community. The two topics were the environment and homelessness. I decided to explore this topic by creating something that would encourage people to preserve Maine's nature. Maine has such beautiful nature that it would be a shame if it was destroyed. For this project I worked with a partner: Grace Wogan. Grace and I originally thought about taking photographs of Maine to encourage preservation to those who saw them, but this would not work with our busy schedules, so we moved to the idea of doing a joint painting and converting them to postcards that we could hand out in out community.

I started out by looking up pictures of Maine to get inspired. We did not choose a specific location, but took some of the images we saw to create our own composition, filled with Maine themed nature. We included mountains, a lake and a bear. We used acrylic paint to create bright red, purple, and green in the mountains. We painted the sky a textured blue with clouds. After painting the lake, we added a gestural reflection of the mountain in the lake to make it more realistic. We then painted the bear with a blotchy gestural technique. We painted the grass around the bear's legs to add an additional layer. This painting was difficult because it required me to work upside down for a bunch of it in order for us to but equal work into it. When we printed out the postcard, we added red text to draw out the red from the mountain.

The first painting took much less time than Grace and I had expected. We decided to make an additional postcard with a new composition. This one was more inspired by the coastlines of Maine. We painted the ocean with much more texture and movement. I really love how much depth was in this painting and how many layers it had. We added rocks in the distance and some up close. We added trees in the far back, as well as some on the rocks. We also added flowers in fine detail on the different islands. We added black text on this postcard, which I think only further enhanced the composition. The dark text added a very cool contrast. Overall I think these postcards show the beauty of Maine, and give forth the message we were trying to convey.