Sustained Investigation #15

For my final Sustained Investigation, my main idea was to create a final grouping of animals, whilst featuring a human as well, to hopefully draw all of my pieces together. I had at first considered cutting up pieces or using old elements of past works to create a collage-style human portrait. However, I thought the best way to properly execute my idea was to create new images. I wanted to create a human portrait with animals filling in the spaces. The style almost reminded me of a movie poster. Above all, however, I wanted to convey the connection of various different animal species to the human spirit. 

I started off on drawing paper for my intitial sketch. However, because I liked my sketch so much, I used transfer paper to translate the sketch onto a piece of bristol board paper. I continued to use graphite pencil to mark out the basics of the final image, then went over everything with the ink pen when it was ready to be finalized. Finally, I went in with more graphite to create more realism through light and shadows.

As previously mentioned, I started off with the basic ideas behind the ultimate design, and settled on a grouping of animals to make up a human portrait. To select the animals, I switched between some of my favorite animals, some visually interesting animals, or those that were light or dark enough to be more unified with the human portrait. I chose a monotone pallete as well, also for the idea of unity in the image. Before I submitted everything as is, I also tried my best to focus on each individual animal to give it a liveliness, especially for the portrait of the woman, to signify a deep spiritual unity overall.