Sustained Investigation #4

In this piece, I tried to create a scene at dusk, where a weary traveler finally reaches the town. The most significant part of this piece is the title, Arrival suggesting an end, but at the same time an opportunity. Arrival hints that there was a purpose to the traveler's trip, and hints that the story isn't over. There is also some significance to the beige, grey and brown houses that appear in the piece, which symbolize the boring and mundane sleepiness of the quiet village. The traveler arriving now could perhaps awaken life, bring interest to a small desert town near a river (the river appears in the first piece). This series itself documents the mundane, the tiresome trip of a lone traveler and his burro, but hints at the potential for something to happen (the character appears with a gun belt, and at one point a red bandana perhaps hinting that the traveler is a bandit of some sort). The fact that the title, Arrival coupled with the western cliché of a gunslinger arriving at dusk makes this piece a little bit more interesting to me, although the real emphasis was on making the sky look cool.

I began this piece to challenge myself by drawing a sunset that was original but also exciting to look at while ending the 'story' created by the previous three pieces. I felt that if I was going to push myself with the subject matter, I should use this piece as practice with watercolor, which I have been using as an underpainting of sorts. Watercolor provides the ability to create really flat colors on the bumpy surface of the paper I was using, so I could have a textured look when I used colored pencils. I chose to use the technical pens because I felt that I needed thin, clean lines to really make the mountains and clouds visible, and to create the shadow and bodies of the traveler and his burro.

I started with an underpainting of watercolors, which is a way for me to build confidence with a medium I am still learning without being reliant on it for the entire piece. Once the watercolor was finished, I used my black technical pens in various sizes to add dark linework to the piece, which encourages the viewer to notice the houses and character first. The last step was colored pencils, which I carefully used to create the sunset, shadows and vibrancy of the tan desert.