Environmental pollution, deforestation, and increasingly threatened species are some of the pieces of information that leave me uneasy and prompt me to develop themes that directly or indirectly address these issues and how I perceive them.
The polar bear, visually speaking, is very iconic and sometimes resembles that old prophet who sees and knows everything before others do. In my artistic representation, the bear family decides to confront the despair in the face of the lack of food in their habitat.
I didn't want to develop an art overtly cataclysmic, but something that bordered on the innocence of a children's book cover. Therefore, I decided to use milder contrasts and a basic distribution of elements only to guide the observer's eyes in a way that easily identifies the elements in the scene in a didactic manner. The issue is serious, but made with the aim of being visually light and, as I mentioned, even a bit naive.
This is the kind of art I develop gradually as a personal project, but it takes shape as it progresses. It was all created using the free software Krita, which is great! Once again, I made heavy use of layers, initially keeping elements on separate layers. However, once defined, the layers are merged because I prefer not to overload the available RAM - in my case, 16 GB. The rule never changes: more layers created means more memory consumed.
At first, I even thought about leaving the oil platform with a more concentrated contrast, but I decided to just leave it there in the background, with the landscape being noticeable but without much impact on the scene. To decrease the intensity of both the platform and the spot/shadow in the sea, I simply reduced the opacity of their respective layers.
I didn't intend to initially put trash around the small iceberg, but I chose to add some just to create the context of the scene and justify the origin of the polar bear family's lunch. Finally, there's nothing like creating a fictional edition of one of the most important magazines and associating my art with an environmental-themed cover idea.
