sustained investigation 9

Polish Chicken

11x9

Watercolor

for this project I wanted to follow my question of how can I show animals and there importance, so I began by thinking of an animal that is in my everyday life, I began thinking as I ate my chicken sandwich. This gave me the idea of doing chicken. As I looked at the chicken images online there wasnt really any that stood out to me. As much as I wanted the image to be able to show the importance of animals in everyday life I also wanted to have some fun with it. With this in mind I kept looking at pictures of chickens and came across a weird looking one, the polish chicken. I was really intrigued by the feathers of the chicken so I began to look into it more. Even though the polish chicken isn't a meat bird and has really nothing to do with my chicken sandwich of inspiration I thought I have some fun and go for it.

I began this project looking at different ways I could fit the idea of the importance role chickens play and this polish chicken into one image, I struggled with this so I just went for it. I began by doing one image that had multiple chickens all in the background, but this backfired when all the chickens changed into one big blob and there wasn't a chicken there anymore. So in frustration, I trashed that image and decided to just do one polish chicken. I did this is watercolor, starting with adding a light back ground just to add some color and then moved on to adding the feathers.

Once I had the basic outline done I moved on to adding detail with the pen and some colored pencil, Im not totally in love with this image but I haven't really been with any of my work this year. I liked how fun this image was, it may not look great, and it may not totally fit my sustained investigation but it was fun and I enjoyed making it. For my next project I hope I can create something that fits a little bit better and uses more technical but also remains fun.