Find your voice

This project was inspired by editorial cartoons, finding something that we care about and creating into an image that uses art to convey the message. For this I wanted to do something with animals because it's something I really care about and feel others should too. So to pass my message on I decided to focus on the endangered animal and poaching aspect for this project. I wanted it to seem like the people in the front weren't noticing what was going on while the animals in the back were all dying. I wanted this image to be bright and vibrant with dark outlines that would help to draw the viewers attention to parts of the page I felt where important. My idea for this was that the people would not be aware of what was happening as the animals in the background are dying, I was hoping this would make people think about what effect they are having on the endangered animals. Yes, most people aren't out killing these animals but the things we do in our everyday life do have affects on the animals. For this reason I chose to add a dark line around the people which separates the people from the animals while still being in the same piece. I also chose to not add a solid boarder around the image because I wanted it to bleed into everyone life who views it, Because there is no dark border around the image it doesn't close the image. It makes it so the image could keep going, and doesn't stop around the image, it could keep going into the views life.

For this project I used Bristol board as my choice in paper because I wanted to use bright colored sharpies and Bristol board holds sharpies well. I began by mapping out a boarder with tape, I didn't want to draw out a boarder in dark I wanted it to be made of color. Then I began by drawing the background and the heap of animals in the back and worked my way to the foreground with the people. I began by just making shapes and once I had the basic shape of each animal down I went in and added the details to each animal. Once I had the outline complete I went in with sharpies and began adding color. For this I started with the people because I knew I wanted to put a dark line around the people. I wanted each person to have some type of animal skin on, and I chose to not show the eyes of the people because I wanted to show them as slightly dehumanized. I chose to add eyes to the small girl because she represents the people who are trying to make things different. After I finished the people I began to add color to the animals. I chose to ex out the animals eyes because I wanted to keep that kind of cartoon look to it, once I finished the animals I began to add color to the background, I wanted to the colors to fade out. I finished this whole piece in sharpie and a tiny bit of colored pencil to help get a lighter color.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project I liked the prompt and the freedom we had with the topic and material choice. I chose to use sharpies because its something that i'm not super confident in so I wanted to branch out and try something new. One thing I think that I would do differently if I were to do this again was to make the distention between the animals and the people greater to make my theme more clear.