The prompt given for my whatchamadrawit drawing was, “a scarecrow afraid of crows”–ironic. The evident ideas in this piece are crows as well as the scarecrow. I thought about how I wanted to set my birds up and decided that I wanted one crow very close up, while the others were in the background “harassing” the scarecrow ironically. This project relates to my life because, when sketching the body of the scarecrow, thought about the one I pass everyday on my way to school in someone’s garden next to their house. I chose to have the scarecrow’s arms in a position where he looked like he was being almost bullied by the crows and therefore scared of them, whereas in real life it would be the other way around obviously, so I thought this prompt was a funny concept to think about.

The process I used to create this piece was first, sketching my main figures out like I do with almost all of my art works, and then thinking about how I could enhance the sketches with elements such as textures and contrasts. I used a 2b pencil to sketch the crows and the scarecrow to make sure that I had accurate and recognizable images for both. Then, after I was happy and content with my sketches, went in with softer pencils to shade and create emphasis on certain parts on the bird, for example to add noticeable texture to its wings.

My project evolved as I began to go back in after I used soft pencils, to then use softer pencils (I used 3b and 4b) to add parts of the sketch that was darker than the other parts. My piece was a process because I layed each pencil mark on top of another to build the contrast within the birds’ features and create shapes that were recognizable and realistic. My project also evolved as I added more birds in the background because although I did want a crow to be up-close and noticeable, I felt that the scarecrow was being ignored a bit, so I addd more crows to draw the eye in to the concept of the scarecrow benign scared by the amount of crows surrounding it. My next steps could be thinking about details that I could add for the background space to enhance the main figures.