Observational Drawings

The objective of these two projects was to practice drawing what we saw in front of us. By doing this, it strengthened our observational skills. The first project was a self portrait made with charcoal. This project was very different then the Creating Value self portrait because we had to look into a mirror at myself to be able to draw my features, instead of a picture of myself. The second project was an observational drawing (then completed with ink) using wooden figurines to draw their shapes and what positions they were in in front of us.

To make these observational drawings, I used pencil, charcoal, and ink. These projects weren't only to get us used to observing, but also to using charcoal and ink since most of us hadn't used them for drawing before. For the self portrait, I used charcoal which proved to be harder than I originally thought. At first I began by outlining specific areas in pencil and then I would shade certain parts with pencil and go over them with charcoal, but then I decided that it was take a lot less time to just use charcoal and then fix any mistakes I made with white charcoal. Since everything had to be black and white, to get the right tones, I had to make the dark tones super dark and the light tones a grey color. On the second project I used pencil to outline the hand, and then went over the outline in ink. To shade, I used the stippling, hatching, and cross-hatching techniques. My favorite one to use and the one that came out the best was the stippling method, which is the top left red hand.

There wasn't very much inspiration and creativity needed for the first project, seeing as it was just an observational drawing of my face. I guess where some creativity could come through was when I tried to keep a neutral face in the drawing and sort of show emotion through the eyes, which came out well because I really enjoyed drawing the eyes and focusing on their detail. The second project required more creativity. We could chose to use either the hand mannequins, or the human mannequins, but I decided to use the hand mannequins for all three drawings because hands are something that I've been struggling to draw ever since I was younger so I got in some practice. All of the motions are very basic gestures, but with the colored ink for each one, I outlined where I imagined the figure would be moving in that picture. The green hand would be shaking the index finger and the fingers of the blue hand would be shaking. I decided to smudge a lot of the background because at first they were just plain colored lines, but then I accidentally smudged one of the red lines, and then decided that I thought it actually looked cooler and gave the piece more pop.