Sustained Investigation #9

Polar

Watercolor pencils

8x9 In

This is my sustained investigation #9 which I created to investigate the use of watercolor pencils and text on my art. I wanted to focus on making a more cartoon style animal for this piece and originally I wanted to do a rat in a pile of garbage but somehow I decided to make a polar bear and I wanted to have a message to go with him so I decided to make text on the piece saying "my home is melting" to create awareness about global warming.

To create this work I first drew the bear and put the text on one piece of paper and then on another piece I created the background after trying a few test patches to get used to the colored pencils and decide how I wanted to mix the color that I wanted. I decided to cross hatch the two colors so when I went over it with a wet brush they would melt together and make the shade of blue that I wanted. I used graphite to first draw the bear and sketch out my lettering then went over the letters with letter printing paper which you sketch over and it prints onto the other paper below. After this I went in with a thin sharpie to fill in the letters and finished them off with a silver thin sharpie to create the melting look on the letters.

When I was planning on making this piece I had originally been looking at rat pictures but then one of a polar bear popped up so I decided to research them more and found some pictures I liked. I'm not super good at realistic art so I transformed those realistic pictures into the cartoon type of bear that I ended up drawing. There are pictures below this of my process which show that I did some experimenting with the colored pencils before I started the real background that I use for the piece.