For the art festival in the town square this year, many of the schools in the county were asked if any of their art classes could paint some banners for display. My Independent Study class only has two people including me, and as we're some of the most advanced and oldest art students, we were tasked with creating the banners. 

The only guideline was that the banners needed to have the text of our assigned subject and be readable, but otherwise, we had complete freedom to create the background as long as it fit into our timeline. 

I made the designs on a Google Drawing before we started the painting. I thought I could do something using the "folk art" genre for the Square Folks design. I think that would have been clearer if we could've added more details to the houses, but we needed to keep the text legible against the background. I thought it would be really cool if for the Square Art design the houses "exploded" into the rest of the banner. 

This is a mixed media still life piece of a cologne bottle, flowers in a jar, and a resin Brachiosaurus skull model. The main objects are shaded using conté charcoal pencils, and the background is a gray marker and colored pencil. 

I set up a spotlight above the objects and turned the overhead light off so I had a more defined and dramatic light source. I knew I wanted to use conté for this drawing as I was introduced to it last school year and love it even more than typical charcoal. I find it much easier to work with and there is a slightly greater variety in colors. I used a marker to make the background because it would cover more space than the pencils and because I thought it would fit in nicely with the look of the conté.

I was worried about the brown conté as I have had some trouble with it in the past, but I thought it would make the artwork so much more interesting and it greatly matched the color of the cologne and the Brachiosaurus skull model.

I am very proud with how this turned out. It is so much better than I expected.