Sustained Investigation #13

Kites in the Clouds

11x9

Marker, water, and Ink

For this project I wanted to continue with following the idea "childhood", I wasnt really sure what I wanted to do for my next project so I just started looking through my old art and old picture. I found one image that I really liked, it was a drawing I had done from a picture, the image was terrible and I couldnt really figure out what the drawing was supposed to be but attacked was the picture that I was supposed to be drawing, it was me and a red kite. This inspired me for my project today.

At first I wanted to do a bunch kite flying over a small village but as I started on the image something didnt feel right, I didnt like my material, the markers were to controlled to flow the way I wanted them to etc, so I trashed that idea and moved to using oil pastels, I tried to place the image that I had in my head onto the paper with the pastels. This also didnt end up working out, I didnt like the way the material clumped together on the page, nothing seemed to look smooth, this lead me to think of paint. So I tried acrylic paint hoping that it would work a little better, this didnt do it for me either. I felt like the colors were all wrong and nothing seemed to fit on the page, the kites ended up looking more like flags. Nothing seemed to be working, so I took a break.

Later I came back with a new idea, I wanted to have the kites flying in the sky with abstract things floating around them, the idea being that the objects were the clouds. Because all little kids see creatures in the clouds. I began this image with an ink pen, I laid out my kites and then moved on to using marker to add the background and color. Once this was done I wanted to blind contour my background but I didn't want it to get onto my kites so I taped over the kites and began to draw. Once this was done I realized that the lines that I saw as clouds, other people saw as harsh lines that stuck out drastically. So I went back with the markers and worked to add highlights around the clouds. I liked doing this because I felt like it made it stand out in a different way, the lines were not longer harsh and black, they had some color and they flowed with the rest of the image. Overall I like this image, it took a while to get here and the process was frustrating but I like how it turned out.