Creative Color Project

This is my creative color project. The objective of this project was to use our observational drawing skills to take an ordinary item, draw it, and then make it unique and different. We did this by adding color to the drawings, instead of just having a plain black and white still life. I chose to draw my graphite pencil set and the case they are kept in. I thought that this would be an interesting item to draw for this project because when the pencils are lined up in their case, and they look so uniform and plain. This inspired me to use them for this colorful project.

I decided to make my observational drawing pure contour, meaning I only drew the main lines and not shadows and highlights. This is because I really wanted to focus on my use of color and not have to worry about creating shadows and highlights with the color just yet. The set was fairly easy to draw, because like I said before, it is very uniform and a basic, straight design. I started out with making each pencil a different color, but then decided that that wasn't really the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted to stray away from the basic uniformity of the pencil set, so I wanted to make the colors unique. So, I decided to take all of my wet, water-colored pencils and I tipped my paper horizontally, so that they all dripped into each other and made a strange, unique color design. I wanted to keep the case black and grey to really make the pencils stand out.

For the background, I was inspired by the cover to the pencil set. It was sitting under the case at an angle, so it looked like a cool outline. It reminded me of one of those Spirograph designs, so I decided that I wanted to make a simple, minimal Spirograph design for my background. SInce the pencils were so colorful, I didn't want to have too much color in the background, so I used thin colored pens and traced the lid of the pencil set over and over again on a round piece of paper. This made the cool Spirograph design that I wanted, and gave me a simple background for the brightly colored pencils.