Sustained Investigation #3

ARTIST STATEMENT

INTERPRET

The story of this is that a seahorse couple has just given birth to a bunch of baby seahorse, and the new parents are admiring their adorable additions to the family. This relates to my life because seahorses are my favorite animal, and my inquiry question for my sustained investigation was about marine life, which I am very interested in.

DESCRIBE MATERIALS

This piece was made with colored pencils. After sketching the seahorses, I went right in with Prismacolor colored pencils and layered them to get depth in color. I also did a lot of burnishing and blending, and finally I used a white gel pen to add a few little details at the very end.

DESCRIBE PROCESS

This piece is the final drawing for my sustained investigation, to which I came up with the inquiry question:“how can I use colored pencils to emphasize the color and texture of marine life?”. I mostly focused on color and texture, since that is what I had addressed in my inquiry. I focused more on color on the seahorse to the left and more on texture with the seahorse on the right. I added depth and shadows with colors, and pronounced the bumps on the fish, as well as adding spots with white gel pen overtop of the yellow. I also wanted to do a different composition this time, so I oriented the paper differently compared to my first 2 pieces and added more than 1 seahorse. The babies and extra bubbles gave a nice addition to the background as well, so that the blue toned paper would look less plain. This project did not evolve throughout the process. I am very pleased with how this turned out, but if I were to take any next steps, my next steps would be to add more detail to the baby seahorses. They were so small that I couldn’t really do much to them, although I tried my best to add some depth to the color of them.