Black and White Animal

This is my black and white animal project. The objective of this project was to create a drawing from observation, much like several other projects we have done this unit. However, unlike others, this observational drawing was to be in black and white instead of color. I could've used any material like paint, ink, charcoal, graphite, or watercolors, as long as the result was primarily black and white. Since this project is observational, I first had to chose the subject of my drawing, and since we have been practicing observational drawings with toy animals, I decided on a toy dinosaur.

The dinosaur was more challenging then I thought it was going to be. The shape of it was pretty simple and easy to replicate, but the texture was very strange and I wasn't sure how to present it in my drawing. My first "draft" was a pure contour drawing of the dinosaur on a colored piece of paper. I didn't really like the way it came out because it was kind of boring, so I decided on trying it over again. For my second draft I used a piece of watercolor paper and made the pure contour dinosaur, but then added the texture ad tried to make it more even and add more depth with water-soluble pencils that gave off a watercolor feeling. I also added two little flowers to the background to get rid of some of the white space.

I ended up messing up the bottom left corner of the second dinosaur, and since I still had the first one, I decided that I could cut out a square of it and paste it over my second one. I used the top right corner of my first dinosaur to do this too, and ultimately liked the way that it came out. I used the green paper to do this with the flowers too in order to create a little bit more balance.