This year for art we have to do a piece about colonialism. I decided to take a different approach to this project and illustrate someone else’s opinions on colonialism. This piece is based off the book “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy which I studied last year. In the book, the characters are heavily affected by the colonialism of India, where they live. A central image of the book is the river. When the children in the book were young it was green and lush but when they return as adults it is dead and dry. This is not entirely fictional, the book is set at a real river that is actually dying. I based the rivers I drew on two pictures of the actual river from where the book took place. To create this piece I layered wax paper on top of a watercolour I did. With the watercolour, I wanted to make it stand out so I went back in with gouache in some areas to add details and darken parts. On the wax paper I used pencil crayon, which ended up showing more translucent than I thought it would. I had originally used a paper that was more brown and showed less of the background and slightly more colour from the pencil crayons but it disappeared so I had to redo it. I tried using white tissue paper after this which really brought out the colour of the pencil crayon but it ripped too easily. I finally settled on the translucent white wax paper. My idea behind using the wax paper on top was to show the progression over time. the final result looked a lot more faded than I imagined but I think it works with the idea.