Find Your Voice

My Find Your Voice project is two faces of different ethnicities with their skulls showing through in front of a background of flowers. My message is that no matter our skin color or the way we look on the outside, we are all the same on the inside and are beautiful in our own ways. Racism and racial prejudice and all the hate and violence people have against others is possibly an issue that makes the least sense to me. How can one person be so cruel to another person just because they don't look the same as them? I strongly feel that everyone is beautiful in their own way even for simply existing.

I used graphite to sketch out the side profiles of the face of a man facing a woman and the exposed side of their skulls and the background of flowers. To color the background I used Prismacolor colored pencils and white charcoal, and for the heads I used charcoal and chalk pastel pencils.

I began this project by measuring out an equal distance between the tips of the noses and the center of the page, and then the tip of the nose to the border in order to create an even balance. I originally wanted to have the inside of the skulls be filled with flowers to symbolize our inner beauty but I thought it might distract from the different skin tones, so I decided to create a spread of flowers for the background which worked out beautifully by filling the space and creating unity between the two faces. When sketching out the flowers of the background, I wanted to have a wide variety of different sizes, shapes, and colors of flowers, but I chose to repeat a few of the same kind throughout the work to enhance the unity of the work. I brought the background to life using Prismacolor pencils and mixed different colors to create value and give the flowers a more realistic affect. I chose to use white charcoal for the daisies because I wanted a strong white that would stand out against the other colors. For the skin tones I used chalk pastel pencils because I knew I was going to use charcoal for the skulls and thought the materials would blend nicely together. The skulls were the trickiest aspect of this piece because I wanted them to look as similar to each other as they could and I have almost zero experience drawing human skulls. Shading them was a challenge too because I wanted to make them as realistic as I could by creating enough depth to give it a 3D look. I'm happy with the way they turned out because they are the only piece of the work where black was used, which makes them stand out a lot, therefore emphasizing my overall message. Even so, if I were to further this project I would consider adding fine outlines to all of the flowers and the faces to make them stand out more.