Environmental Advocacy Project

FROGS FOR A CAUSE

JUN. 11, 2018 — digital

In this project, as the final project of the year, we were assigned to make a piece that advocated for some kind of environmental change. The subject (e.g. what issue we depicted) was left up to us.

I had a hard time getting started. I knew that I wanted to do something with endangered species, but I wasn't really sure what. After a while of searching, I decided on frogs—surprisingly, there are a lot of endangered frogs, which meant that I had a lot of options to choose from—and I decided that I would make them into stickers. I spent a while going through lists of frogs, finding ones that I found funny or cute or otherwise aesthetically pleasing, and then I set out and began to draw. I initially thought that it would be pretty easy (since sticker projects are usually the ones that take the least amount of time) but it quickly became clear that it wasn't going to be that simple. I've probably never drawn a frog in my life until this project, which meant that I had no concept of anatomy when I started. Drawing the outline of the frogs was daunting, and it was time-consuming, but I managed to do it with the help of many (many) very helpful reference pictures. Then came the coloring, which was something else entirely. I'm used to using flat colors and adding texture by just using lines and dots, but it turns out that frogs have a lot of unique patterns and colorings that I don't usually draw. It took a lot of experimenting with different brushes and colors to get the look that I really wanted, but I was determined to make sure that these frogs actually looked vaguely like real ones. After repeating this process several times (which took many hours, far more than I anticipated), I was done.

I have mixed feelings about this project. On the downside, it was really time consuming for me, and also it was really difficult—my lack of anatomical knowledge, combined with my distaste for drawing realistic pictures, meant that I spent a lot of time reconsidering my subject. However, in the end, I think that they all turned out alright—the colors and shapes of each drawing is relatively close to the frog that it's based off of, and I think that I made good use of shadows. I also tried to mix it up a bit by making the frogs be in different poses, and although there isn't that much variation, I think that there's enough distinction between them that it's obvious that I tried. If I had more time, I would probably have tried to draw more frogs—but, as it is, I think that I made good use of the time available to me, and I'm happy with how these came out.