Time Capsules

In my art, you can clearly see that each piece has some pop of color of oil pastel and some spots are plain. The story told in the first piece is the playhouse my father and I built for my little sister. That playhouse has a blue door so I used a blue pastel to color the door. The second piece is a self-portrait of my face looking down into a mirror. I added a background of diamonds/tie-dye so it wasn't so plain. The last piece I made an uncooked onion and colored around it gross color mixtures since I don't like uncooked onions. These relate to my life because the building is a safe place my sister and I go to relax, the self-portrait is myself, and the onion is something I don't like to eat. I like cooked onion slices in foods, but I don't like uncooked onions so I showed my dislike through color and pattern.

To start off, I cut smaller pieces of paper and then added a boarder for each one. My work was made by first taking my graphite pencil, looking at the playhouse, and started to sketch lines. Since the house is made out of wood I added lines to show the texture. I colored the door with a blue oil pastel since the original door is blue. The second piece I sat in my living room with a mirror and slowly sketched my face onto a piece of paper on my coffee table. The mirror was quite small which made the sketching more of a challenge. I went in and added some more detail to my face with the graphite pencil. I wanted to add to the background so it wasn't all white space so I added blue, purple, and green oil pastel marks in diamond shapes to make it pop. The onion piece was gross colors blended on top of each other, and hidden in the green there is a small waterdrop to represent when you cut onions and they make you cry. After each piece, I went over the colorful oil pastel marks with a white oil pastel in order to blend to colors together.

The process of creating each piece was similar. I had to create art not by looking at a picture but by looking at the physical thing itself. This made it challenging because something I would lose my place or if I move I am at a different perspective than before. My project evolved from when I went back in and added color to each piece, in a way it gives each piece a theme which is having oil pastel as a pop of color next to graphite pencil. My next steps could be to deepen the graphite value. The shades I have on the graphite marks are lighter throughout so I could go back in and add more darker shades. I would also go in and scratch more detail into the oil pastel so it looks like it has texture. I don't want the color to overpower the graphite image though, I want it to look balanced.