Indiana Bat

Isabella Perrotta

ARTIST STATEMENT

This scratch board art project was created to represent an endangered North American animal. The Indiana Bat or Myotis Sodalis was the animal I choose to depict in my illustration. The process that this project took was unexpected; the silver bat was the first bat scratched away in the same style that I am most comfortable drawing. When this was completed I was presented with a challenge, the silver bat does not show very much silver color and was not drawn to be compatible with the media I was using. The aforementioned challenge was to invert the black and silver bat. I chose to do this so the new bat would mirror the old one and would be scratched in gold scratch board to further the contrast. This was very much a pivotal part of the project as I began to see the silver bat as the Indiana Bat in its current state of distress, dull and incomplete on its way to extinction. While the gold bat is what the Indiana Bat was and could be again, glowing and full of life.