Here's something different for a change: a traditional art piece!

I'm taking an intermediate drawing class this semester, and for our most recent assignment we were tasked with constructing our own wooden pallet and then making a piece to go directly on the face of it. Our topic was, appropriately enough, environmental issues.

For this work I focused on oil pipelines, specifically the many we've been building nowadays through indigenous lands that almost immediately after being built literally burst and released hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the surrounding environment, toxifying the land and permanently defacing what was previously sacred and protected land.
I also distinctly wanted to have a nod to the dangers of finning, or at the very least have some sort of reference to the endangerment of the global shark population. Shark populations have been dangerously dwindling due to little to no laws and regulations on the finning industry, causing thousands of sharks to be stripped of their fins and then dumped back into the ocean to sink to the bottom and slowly die a long and painful death. Shark populations have grown so thin due to this malpractice that they could very well be endangered, but their numbers literally can't be counted; nobody can find them. Which if you ask me is even more alarming than them being declared as endangered.

In any case, this piece was originally done on the wood pallet in acrylic, gouache, and ink pens. I took various photographs of the finished piece and did my best to recreate it for the digital format. Something that can't be seen, however, is the highlights in the oil are done with iridescent paints, to give a greater shimmer on the real-life piece.