Sustained Investigation #2

Title: The Cool, Totally Not Ugly, Duckling

WidthxHeight: 12''/9''

Why: For this project, we had to follow our question. Mine was "how can we turn something ugly into something beautiful?" So, obviously when most people think of the word "ugly", they think of "The Ugly Duckling". So, I made a piece that involved an ugly duckling. I wanted to draw him like he was from a children's book -- but then I got the idea to draw him creating a book (and it coming to life). So I tried to make him look as ugly as possible, but also hard to hate.

What: The subject of my work is an ugly duckling. The drawing was made with saturated colored pencils. I really didn't want to work with something too complicated this round so maybe next time I will work with large oil pastel sticks. But I also wanted it to look like a children's book so I would obviously use colored pencil. The hardest part about this was trying to decide on a background color. I wanted the walls to be plain so it wouldn't distract from everything else, but I also wasn't a fan of a white background, so I tried to shade the edges of the room as much as I could. I was going for a cartoon piece. I'm happy with the outcome of the duck.

How: I used color, form, texture and space in this piece. I made sure to separate the colors as best as I could. Wanted to try cell shading once again. The fun part was blending the yellows, oranges and browns to show the shadow. I went for something that was more of my style.