With this work, I was trying to bring awareness to duck conservation by showing a male wood duck with his five ducklings on a pond. We watched a bell ringer before we started this project and the motivation behind it was to teach younger people how important conservation is because these beautiful species and scenes may not be around someday if we aren't careful. I wanted to show this duck family because there wasn't a mother in the picture and I wanted to show how the male duck is caring for the duckling which isn't as common as a female duck.

This work was made by me first drawing a light sketch using shapes to figure out the composition of my piece, I did this by using a light pencil. After that, I did a light blue coat of watercolor as a base because I knew how much blue would be in this piece. Once I had finalized my sketch I started to color with the lily pads, I choose to do these first because I knew that they'd be simple, I tried to fade the lighter green to the darker green on the edge of the lily pads. After the lily pads, I did the sky which I made way to blue, once the sky was done I tried to use a gray colored pencil to shade the clouds but it was hard to make them look not scratchy while keeping them light. After this, I colored my wood duck and ducklings and used acrylic paint to do the white dots on the chest of the adult male. Lastly, I did the water which I tried to make it look like it was moving but it really just looks scratchy, I did the vegetation on the edges and tried to capture the reflection of the ducks by using the same colors but lighter in the water.

When making this I had to go through a long list of different ducks and geese that were acceptable to draw in this competition. I knew that I wanted to do a colorful duck so when I saw how some wood ducks have a purple or blue feather by their wings I knew that I wanted to draw a wood duck. I looked through Pinterest to find some good inspiration pictures and that's when I saw the duckings, they were so cute I knew that they had to be included. In my original sketch, there was a female, male, and ducklings but I decided to get rid of the female duck because it made the composition too busy. I definitely had done many different sketches until I got the right shapes that I wanted. the first sketch that I had done I loved by when I did my watercolor wash I used too much water so my sketch faded away causing me to restart.