I created this artwork in my Art & Design 201 class this past semester at Purdue. This has been one of my favorite classes I've ever taken. I love art of all kinds. Drawing has always been a passion of mine but photography is something I love to do also. I took a couple of black & white photography classes in high school that I absolutely loved. I would love to someday have my own dark room. Its my dream to be an elementary teacher during the school year and to spend my summers and other breaks working on art. It will be interesting to see if that dream someday comes true!

How I did it: In my art class we spent hours drawing pictures of flowers and plants. One of my favorites was my contour line drawing of these tulips. For one of our projects we had to take one of our favorite drawings and 'make it better' by adding color to it. The technique I used was a long process. First I experimented with two media and 3 colors. I chose a yellow and an orange crayon and a black oil pastel. So I took a 9x12 sheet of white drawing paper and covered the entire thing with yellow crayon. Let me tell you, my arm was hurting big time after that cause my art teacher said to press hard until we had a waxy finish. Next I went over the yellow with orange. Then for the final preparation I covered the whole page with black oil pastel. The next part was a bit time consuming as well. Since my art teacher, Dr. Geahigan wanted us to use a picture we had already drawn, we had to 'transfer' the original image on top of the prepared surface. So I had to trace my tulip drawing, turn over the tracing paper and cover the back of it with chalk and then place the chalked side on top of the oil pastel surface and then trace over the tulips again so that the chalk line would show up on the black surface (whew ... that was a run-on sentence if I've ever seen one). Then, with a sharp object (I used a ball point pen, but a paring knife would work well also) I scraped off the black layer in the design of the tulips. I then added richness to the picture by scraping off a texture pattern in the background and in a select few of the tulips. And the tulip picture above was my finished product!