Sustained Investigation 9

Madame Vice President

10x14

Watercolor

My idea for my 9th Sustained Investigation was to base it around the new vice president, Kamala Harris because she broke records, and will go down in history as the first woman vice president. I believe that’s a huge inspiration for the younger generation or anyone in general whose dreams are to be like her too, so in my painting I decided to draw a little girl looking at the mirror and seeing Kamala Harris. This shows that she seeing herself to be as successful as the vice president and that she is her role model. Going into this, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to make/what my composition was going to look like, but I knew I wanted to add a “role model” aspect to it which is exactly what I did. I first used a pencil to sketch out my design and later went over it with watercolor, and later used a pen to outline everything. For my past sustained investigations, I’ve also been using watercolor which I’m not very strong with. For my last sustained investigation, I used acrylic paint all the years before when I took an art class, and I really liked how that one turned out. I was debating on either using acrylic paint or watercolor, but I didn’t want to add huge amounts of detail, so I decided on watercolor. Now looking at the end result of my piece, I kind of wished I used acrylic paint instead because although that requires more time to dry and will require me to go in with detail in my paintings, I enjoy using it more and I feel like my end results always look better when I paint with acrylic paint. When I went into this project, I still had no idea what I wanted my composition to look like. I first started off with drawing Kamala Harris’s silhouette and sort of stared army paper for awhile thinking of what I wanted to make. Then, I thought it would be cool to add a mirroring effect, and that’s when I made the mirror and the little girl. That executed to draw the outline of her room. I did not want the painting to look “bland” and I was really stuck on what to add, but I thought back on my last sustained investigation where I printed out things and glued them on to the painting, so I thought of doing the same thing with this painting since a lot of news headlines/article titles were really strong on the topic on having Kamala Harris as the first female vice president, so thats what I did. If I was able to redo this project, I definitely think I would use acrylic paint instead, and because of this I believe I'm going to start using acrylic paint in future sustained investigations.