Culminating part 2

1. My priorities when I create art are to create something that I’m happy with, regardless of how awful it may look to someone else. My art is mine and it exists for my own satisfaction and expression.
2. I work well with charcoal. I like using pastels as well. I primarily do landscapes.
3. I want my audience to see my art and interpret it however they choose. I do landscapes because I like doing landscapes, I think they look nice, and my audience can interpret it as anything they want. Maybe someone will identify with a location they are familiar with, or maybe it will inspire someone to go somewhere similar or completely different to the landscape in the work.

My final work was done in charcoal and coloured pencil. I wanted to experiment with coloured pencil to see if I could give it the washed-out, hazy look of the charcoal. Unfortunately, the colour is very hard to see in the photo (it looks better in real life, I promise!). I started by drawing a landscape in charcoal and then shading and detailing it a bit with the charcoal, then I took coloured pencil and coloured and further detailed the ground and sky very lightly. The result was this muted, dreamlike look that I really liked, and at first glance it's hard to tell that it's anything but a black charcoal drawing. I used a special type of charcoal pencil that interacts differently with light than regular charcoal. Depending on how dark you shade it, it can look very light and washed-out (the detailing on the terrain), grayish and reflective like pencil (the edges of the terrain), or dark and pronounced like regular charcoal (the darker area in the bottom-left corner). I really like how this one turned out though I wish it looked better when photographed.