CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibitions

Teacher Name: Deidra Grimm
Grade: 11

Materials: Oil pastel and pencil
Dimensions: 12” x 18”
Description: In this work of art, I am trying to achieve the feeling of freedom and an escape into the universe. My catalyst question was “How can I use highways to explore freedom in my drawing using pastels. I was able to visually express this question by having a highway that comes away from the earth and towards the sun, showing the freedom from life and problems on earth. Originally I wanted to use a different prompt, but after going through the brainstorming process I realized I didn’t have many ideas for it, but after trying some of the other prompts, I had a clear vision in my head of what I wanted to draw. The technique that I most used for my drawing was mixing oil pastel with water and using it like I would use watercolor or watercolor pencils. I think it gave my artwork some uniqueness and made it look soft and welcoming, which is how you would hope freedom would look.
I developed the design in my project by first looking at the prompt. When I saw the word freedom I immediately thought of outer space and escaping the earth, so I did a rough sketch, and then I created a final sketch where I fixed all the mistakes from the rough sketch. I decided to put the highway as the foreground because I felt it was the most important part of the artwork, the other planets (including the sun) and the UFO were put in the middle ground to show the highway moving towards them, and the stars were put as the background as it makes sense for them to be the furthest away. I cropped the sun because I thought it would look better if it wasn’t uncropped, I overlapped the highway over the stars and earth and the bottom part of the sun to show that it was the foreground of my artwork, and I overlapped the planets and UFO over the stars to show that the stars were the furthest away. The most successful part of my project is the stars. I was nervous at first because they weren’t looking how they did in my head, but after blending the colors together with a little bit of water and letting that dry, they looked very glowy and soft, which is exactly what I was going for. The studio time was probably my biggest setback. Since my work required using a ruler and a material I had never used before (oil pastels), it took me a little bit longer to create the final drawing than I had hoped. I was able to finish right on time, but I wish I would have had more time to add more details and blend the colors together more. The biggest challenge I had was initially trying to blend the oil pastels while they were dry. I was able to overcome this by using a paintbrush with a little bit of water to help me blend. I think Van Gogh was a big inspiration in my artwork. I wanted to do a sky with stars and I really like how his painting “a starry night” has that round glowy blended out stars, so I tried to achieve a similar look.