There are many different ideas that I attempted to capture in this piece, one specific one being bringing life to the drawing and trying to capture the colors accurately and realistically to the ducks. I wanted the ducks to eb in some sort of NATURAL pose, evident by the pose of the adult male in my piece. At first those pose was harder to capture but after getting a grasp on how I would do it in the sketching phase it became much easier. I didn’t want my ducks to be in the same position, I wanted them to look more lifelike and possibly even as if they were moving around just slightly. There was also the idea of accurate colors that I wanted to capture, the colors between adult and juvenile ducks differed, and I wanted to make that clear by choosing to draw these two stages of the ducks life to SHOW that difference. I chose the adult male specifically due to its vibrant colors during breeding season specifically. This relates to me because I chose to do these two stages in order to show these colors. I chose specifically what duck I wanted to do/wanted to capture in my piece due to specific reasons such as the colors. The bright blue in the beak was the specific thing that made me want to choose this duck in the first place. I liked the vibrance of this specific part of the duck and felt that I wanted/needed to include it within my piece.

The paper I used was watercolor paper, mostly due to the water in the background that I made using both water color and colored pencil. The rest of this piece was made in colored pencil, I used a mixture of two different browns and one black for the bodies of the duck, and differing grays and blues for the different beaks of the duck. The colors of one duck was more vibrant than the other, so I pushed harder with one specific color in an attempt to make that clear/show that more accurately. I chose colored pencil because I believed I could control the pencil how I wanted, and add smaller more specific details to the piece. I wasn’t confident that I could make something realistic using watercolor so I decided that using colored pencil was the best option. I was happy with my decision, as using colored pencil made the process easier, although I hadn’t used it super realistically before it was still a material that I was familiar with.

The first step was researching, this was the stage in which I chose the specific duck that I wanted to do. I chose the Ruddy duck because of the adult males bright and vibrant colors during breeding season. I simply liked the look of the feathers and the blue beak and so chose to do this specific breed of duck in my artwork. The initial sketch was my favorite part of this piece, I really liked how it looked, and frankly was nervous to add color to it. The sketch was slightly different from the two sketches I had for a general idea, but I liked it better than the two ideas I had come up with. The next step was the watercolor wash, I chose green because it was the color of the water, and on top of the wash I began to build the actual water around my duck simply because I began to enjoy working with the watercolor. After this, I began with the adult male duck, starting with the eye and slowly building out and adding more detail with my colored pencil. I moved from the eye, to the head, to the body, and ended with the beak and followed this process with the duckling just with altered colors. After the ducks were finished I added some final details to the water using colored pencil in order to make ripples in the water around the drawing and specifically around the ducks. My next steps could be to continue drawing with more detail using colored pencil in order to get more practice.