Opacity Project

1. Overall I don't think my piece came out as well as it should've. Chalk was very challenging for me and I had difficulty blending and making certain lines well defined. Some of the bottles blend together making it hard to tell that they overlap. If I understood how to work with chalk and overlap what I'm drawing I could've produced a better quality piece.

2. The soda cans, soup can, milk carton, ect. are what make the piece look  more like the inside of a recycling bin. By putting cans and such underneath my clear glass and plastic bottles I incorporate opacity and make the items look layered and staggered like in a recycling bin.

3. The colors I chose were based on the colors of common recyclables such as popular soda brand. There are a lot of greens, blue, orange, brown and of course white for the opaque bottles. I tried to spread the colors out to create contrast within the recycling bin.

4. Like I said before I spread out the colors I used and put dark or bold colors next to the light and bland colors. I also tried to put different type of bottles or items around each other to create contrast through what was in the bin.

5. I had trouble adding shadows because it came to a point where no matter how many times I went over the paper with chalk no more color would come off on the paper. The shadows I put on the bottom silver of the soda cans made them look more three-dimensional. Also the shadows on the soda bottles and beer bottle made their shapes more round. The highlights on the plastic bottles created the plastic and 3-D look.

6. I chose the dark green background because that is the color of recycling bins and it's a dark contrasting color that would make the objects pop more.

7. After this project I get why it's important to understand the media and how to use it to create a successful piece because if you don't you can't achieve a realistic look. You have to know how to layer and blend and not add to much color at first. I think practice and experimentation is key in this situation.

8. I had trouble layering color and adding as much color as I wanted. For example you can still see brown paper in the background behind the green because the green stopped coming off on the paper after a certain amount of layers. Also I couldn't draw over an object with a different color, especially with white, because the colors just ended up blending and looking like one. If I understood how to layer chalk pastels my piece would've turned out a lot better.

Facial Features

For this exercise I learned how to draw and shade facial features to make them look realistic. To do an eye you need to make the eyeball look spherical by shading around the edges. You also need to shade under the eyelid to make it look like it's standing out over the eyeball. For the ears it's key to shade dark in the insides of the ear and light on the parts that stick out. Also to make the ear look round you need to shade around the outside edges. To draw lips you first need to draw the outline of them then draw what looks like hair coming out either side of the middle line. After you do that you can shade making the area around the middle line and edges darkest (depends on where the light source is) and the middle of each lip lightest. For the nose you first draw the outline of the nostrils and bottom of nose then you can begin shading. To form the rest of the nose such as the bridge you just shade according to wear the light source hits. This exercise has reminded me that shading is necessary to make something look realistic.

Smarties

This assignment had to do with opacity and learning how to create it on paper. Everyone was given a smarties and the task of drawing it in chalk. Personally I don't like using chalk because I find it hard to layer and work with without all the colors blending together or smudging. The individual smarties inside the wrapper had to have value to create a three dimensional look. The wrapper itself wasn't too hard to draw but figuring out how to create all the folds and twists I saw on my smarties was challenging at times. Drawing highlights on the wrapper over the candies was also challenging because the white wouldn't show up in some spots. Overall I enjoyed this project because I gained practice with creating opacity which is an important element in making a piece look realistic. I think my piece could have come out a little better if I had more practice with chalk but it's a good start.

M&M's

For this project we used Prismacolors to draw a candy wrapper of choice. I chose a brown M&M wrapper but drew it in yellow. This project was a challenge for me because I couldn't get the shading and the creases in the wrapper right. The highlights look like random lines and the shaded regions didn't create the depth I was looking for. The M&M is the only part of the wrapper I like. If I were to do this project over again I would take more time figuring out how to draw folds and creases in a wrapper especially because I struggled with the same thing for the fabric drawing.

Lollipop

For this assignment we had to draw and shade a Dum-Dum with Prismacolor colored pencils. This was my second time doing this project so it came pretty easy. To shade the wrapper I used purple because it was one of the colors in the wrapper. Shading was key to make the lollipop look 3D. I expected drawing the letters to be harder but they were pretty simple. Prismacolors are definitely one of my favorite mediums to use after doing this project. 

Look at that View

Inspiration Pictures

 Compositional and final sketches

Final Piece in-progress (not finished yet!)

1. For my project I chose to draw the front of my car looking from the grills level. The picture does have an interesting point of view but I don't think it has as much perspective as I wanted because it's one larger object in one point.

2. Perspective is important because it's in everything we see every single day. If we want to draw what we see in perspective it's essential to understand where you are in comparison to that object so the lines go in the right direction.

3. Practicing with colored pencil helped me understand how to layer colors to get the effect I want. It also taught me which colors to use to get a good variation and that it's okay to use colors totally opposite of the color of your object. In my piece I made sure to use at least 2 different colored pencils for each different color area I shaded.

4. I think my coloring came out pretty good but I struggled with creating depth and variation in the black portions and blending my colors together. To color my piece I started with the main color of the car and then added dark and lights variations over top and then went back with the main color again.

5. There are three main parts to my car which are the windshield, hood and grill. Those three things separate the piece but I don't think they create very much depth since it's just one large object.

6. This project was actually very fun for me because my car is something I am very passionate about. Being able to observe it so closely and explore mixing different colors helped me improve on problems I've had with shading for previous projects. I struggled with coloring the hood the most because the only color I had to be a contrast on the black hood was silver and not grey so some spots look metallic when the light hits it.

7. I think I would've felt a little more adventurous when picking my topic for this piece if we had practiced drawing different objects in perspective a lot more. I also would've liked more practice with prismacolor colored pencils so I could experiment before doing a final.

Still Life Final

In-Progress

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 Final

1. I think my final Still Life project turned out to be a good quality piece of work. The objects are all well defined and most of the page is clean and well-blended. One thing that I could've improved on is the amount of smudges throughout the piece.

2. A few objects are more realistic than others but you can tell what I have drawn. I included as many shadows as I could for example there's a shadow behind the card and in multiple places behind the fabric. Also I definitely could've used a wider range of values and made the whole piece darker but my style of art tends to be lighter and softer.

3. You can tell that the light source is in the top left because the right of the page is darker and the fabric at the bottom is darker. 

4. The compositional sketches are very important because they gave us practice with getting shading and proportions correct. There were so many objects on the table that you had to really study all the their details in order to include all the shadows. By drawing the table over and over again I grasped the main elements of the objects in view.

5. The most successful parts of my drawing were the cards, the fabric and the shadows. The fact that my cards were so much lighter than the rest of the piece and had shadows made them stand out. Also my fabric has good movement because of the way I drew and layered the lines.

6. The proportions and perspective of my final piece turned out pretty accurate after practicing with the compositional and final sketches. I finally figured out where to place the large can in the front and how large to make it in order for the rest of my objects to fit in correct perspective on the page. 

7. My eye is drawn to the top/middle right of the page because of all the shaded objects and layers. If the wall decoration to left on top of the fabric was finished the piece would've been a lot more balanced but it still has a pleasing composition. 

8. Like mentioned in question 7 the eye is drawn to the top/middle right of the page. The large can in the front creates a center of interest because of its size and the amount of shadows that surround it.

9. This project took me a while but most projects do because of how particular I am. Shading takes me a while and I've always had problems with getting it just right especially on round objects. I could definitely improve on creating a darker range of values.

10. Like I mentioned before I really struggled with shading and creating value. To fix this I had to keep going over the areas I shaded and make them darker. Another thing I struggled with is keeping the piece clean because it constantly smudged and ruined the light parts of my piece. The only way to fix the smudging was to erase and redefine any shapes that got messed up.

11. Still Life has taught me I need to work on shading and perfecting shapes. It has also helped me better understand value and how to create it. I can now look at an object and more easily figure out where the light source hits and the shadows form.