Thursday, September 20, 2012

Portrait




There were many different steps to drawing this portrait. First, I had to trace all the values we saw in the photograph on a piece of tracing paper, and then I colored the back of the tracing paper to transfer it into my sketchbook.  With the outline of all the values, I was able to fill in the entire face with all the shadows for my final piece.
Since the picture was in black and white, I could see all the shadows on the girl's face and hair.  To trace these values on my paper, I had to put it up to the light on the window because some were harder to see than others.  It was really helpful to have the value chart to compare my drawing to because it helped me figure out how dark or light to shade certain areas.
I think I achieved the full range of value in my portrait.  In some parts of the hair, I was pressing down as hard as I could with my pencil and then in some parts of the face, I was shading as lightly as possible.  I probably have more middle values than anything, so maybe I could've improved by making some areas darker.

My craftmanship on this portrait was neat, but could've been better.  It was hard to make the different values blend together sometimes, so I think some parts look a little bit rough because I was changing the pressure of my pencil.  Other than that, I think my craftmanship was good. There aren't any stray lines and I did my best to make it look neat.
An obstacle I had to overcome was when I was trying to draw the eyes on the portrait.  They have such a distinct shape and there was a wide range of values on and around the eyes.  I was able to deal with it by starting in the center of the eye and working my way out. Also, I made sure I included the highlight in the eye.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Shapes

I really like the way my shaded shapes drawing turned out with the different colored oil pastels on each shape.  The colors really stand out and look bright on the black paper. The shapes were overlapping each other since they were on different planes, so I tried to be as neat as possible while blending the colors next to each other.  I'm glad I got to practice shading the shapes a lot before I started the final project because it made the final project so much easier and better.  If I made any changes to the project, it would be to fix my sphere because I always have a harder time drawing and shading those than the other shapes because of the circular motion you have to use.  Overall, I feel like this project was successful and I am not disappointed with any of it.  I learned to be patient with my work and not go too fast, how to use different values of color, and make shadows that look realistic.