Map drawing 

The main idea that guided our artwork was our original prompt to make a map design that represents your life. This could be a physical line drawn across countries or states to represent the places you lived or a line going around a drawing of your school to represent a day in your life. I choose to make a drawing of the earth that highlighted the two places I have lived in, Germany and Maine. The idea was to draw the Earth as a globe but then to outline the country and state in the way they would be on a map, this makes the two places pop along with the fact that they are colored in with their respective flags. Up above in space is an astronaut that represents me, because i'm literally floating between the two places, just like how I have floated between the two places all my life. Notably i'm not tied to either place, because even though both places have always been my home and they hold a lot of sentimental value, this won't be it for me forever. I don't plan on staying in the places I have called home all my life. 

This piece was drawn on a standard piece of artist paper. First I sketched out the globe below, I went onto google maps and oriented the globe to get the same perspective so I could accurately sketch out the Afro-Eurasian countries shown. The Atlantic ocean is a bit squished to make sure Maine got into the picture. Then I outlined the globe and the continents with a black pen, making a thick border around Germany and Maine. Then I colored in most of the land green with a nice green Blike marker, after that the ocean was cored in my own of-brand used blue marker, which made it quite streaky. I used a reference photo to sketch and draw the astronaut, whose design I simplified a bit. After I colored in the austronout I realized I could not find my usual black alcohol marker that I would have used to color in the sky. Instead I used a white bored marker, knowing it would leave streaks I colored in the same direction the whole time so it would be uniform. 

  There was not much of a process in terms of iderations with this work, I started and ended it on this paper. That doesn't mean my ideas didn't change as I was making it. I started out by drawing the earth but I was exactly sure what to do with the empty space that was the outer space above. I knew I wanted to have some version of myself above literally afloat between the two, so I settled on an astronaut that wasn't tied to either of the places.