Rationale

My topic is New Zealand waterway pollution, particularly relating to farm runoff. I chose Eugenie sage, the conservation minister and associate environment minister, as she is someone trying to save rivers. I represented her surrounded by brown polluted rivers and more closely guarding the plants and creatures that live in them.

I chose natural colours, browns indicating the pollution of the rivers and green/blue showing the unpolluted river, creatures/plants that live in them, and to represent Sage being in the Green Party.
The contrast of the sketchy full-colour portrait and flat monochromatic surrounding elements makes the portrait stand out as the most important prat of the image.

I used parody and exaggerated what's happening in the surrounding events. I wanted to represent both good and bad aspects of the problem, showing that it's not black and white and there are lots of variables. Though dairy farming is a major part of the problem it's not the only thing, and many farmers are trying to do something about it.
The five events I chose are:

• Havelock North water supply being polluted in 2016 by (most likely) sheep faeces after flooding got it into the water supply, causing a massive amount of the population to get sick and three deaths.
• Nick Smith announcing the government's new goal of 90% of rivers being swimmable by 2040, but being nonspecific about what 'swimmable' means - and they'd changed the acceptable levels of contamination. The monitored rivers are also only main ones, not any of the many smaller creeks and streams.
• Recent protests at Te Waikoropupu Springs wanting it to be better protected, after (among other things) pollution was found in the nearby Fish Creek from nearby farms.
• Recent government announcement about restricting nutrient runoff from farms, which made a lot of people mad about destroying the dairy industry despite the fact that many farmers think it's a good idea.
• The fact that dairy farms must be fenced, but beef and dairy farms don't necessarily have to - and in all cases, fencing often doesn't solve the problem, nutrients can travel a long way after soaking into the ground.

I chose a fluid layout mirroring braided rivers as it flows around the page and is relevant to the topic - there are many different aspects of the issue separating and coming together at various points.

In the animated version, I made her eyes move around looking at everything that's happening - her eyebrows move and mouth purses disapprovingly at nick smith, then less so at the things below that are more positive.

animation

Animation - I moved her eyes, looking around at the things around her in a concerned way. Also moved her eyebrows and mouth a little disprovingly.

the separate layers: (eyeball, iris and white shines are separate too)

Final details

-Added more plants and creatures, redrew over some of the old ones

-fixed up a few details in the background, like the text

-made the edges of the portrait more solid, and changed a bit of the shading

-made the lines of the river thinner

Posters put up in class today.

Progress

The river taking up the entire image, with the illustrations in the eddies.

I think ultimately this one doesn't work as well, the rocks draw too much attention and it's a bit muddy in a way that makes it compositionally confusing.

-The river being braided with the illustrations in the islands.

I added more braids so it's a bit more natural and also artery-like.

Also added the plants/creatures/pollution - which I wasn't sure about as it maybe draws the attention down too much? But I do like the addition of the brighter green/blues.

Redrew the portrait because I want it to be more obviously traditionally sketchy (as a contrast to the more flat digital elements of the background - though will edit it a bit digitally to fix the anatomy a bit. I also made it a3 because if we're printing it at a1 size it needs to be more detailed/high quality,

For the interim I did a better draft, but I lost it all when the file got corrupted overnight.

it looked something like this but the river and outside sketches were more detailed (though not finished) and I did a whole lot of creatures and plants around her neck - which were fairly finalised, though I didn't really like the composition of them and wanted feedback on that. going forward I think I'll do them smaller and not quite as bright colours as I had them.

the colours were also changed a bit from this, and I had added some detail to the portrait.