Crooks

For Crooks, by drawing in the style of a cave painting, but having the subject be something from where I live that I see in my day-to-day life—I essentially tried to create a piece of art that answers the question: if archaeologists found a cave painting I did in 10,000 years, what would it be of? I tried to capture the feeling of a cave painting by using a combination of mediums (charcoal, graphite, oil pastel, and watercolor) as well as experimenting with drawing on different surfaces, such as pavement, to simulate a rocky texture, since cave paintings are, after all, drawn on the insides of caves. I also used a limited palette of muted, natural colors to match those found in real-life cave art. To capture the stylistic tendencies of early humans who created cave paintings, I used rough, sketchy linework and patternless geometric shapes in the background. For the subjects—the raccoons—I used loose, rounded shapes to portray them in an idealized way, making them feel static and motionless, similar to what you would see in cave paintings from thousands of years ago. This is meant to capture their essence stylistically, especially given the crude and few tools & materials the cavemen who made them had at their disposal.