Creating Value

For this assignment, I made two drawings—a graphite value scale and a graphite self portrait. The graphite value scale was composed of two images—one with sprayed boxes each with its own shade and one that was unrestricted and had no boxes. For the self portrait I had the option of doing just a self portrait of me or combining two images. I chose the latter and decided to weave together two pictures of me and my identical twin brother.

I started my graphite value scale by making two boxes. In one of the boxes I made one inch sections. I started that box by making the lightest shade first and then worked my way to to the darkest shades. For the second box I also started by making the left side the lightest and shaded using my pencil, working my way to the right where I made it the darkest. For the self portrait I began by printing both pictures. I gridded the picture with one by one inch boxes. Then I grided my piece of drawing paper so it corresponded with the grids on the pictures. Next I wove the images together, making sure to include a balance of me and my brother (although maybe a little more of me). When I had woven them together, I started the drawing. The reason I made the grids on the drawing paper and on the images was because I would follow a process called gridding. This method required me to take the drawing a step at a time—which I liked—by drawing the individual boxes and the shades of white grey and black in them. I worked my way through the picture going left to right. I made sure to include a contrast of shades, from the light on my face to the depths of the backround. You can probably see that some grids of the page are very contrasted in comparison to the adjacent ones. That was simply because the background of one of the images was dark and the other one's background was light, so the woven grids showed the different values in the background.

The reason I decided to weave me and my brother's pictures together was because I wanted to do something new and creative. I was tired of doing the same old strait self portrait and wanted to make something creative, so I wove our faces together. I thought this was especially cool because we are identical twins and I thought that it could show some of the differences and likenesses of our faces.