Art Historical Self Portrait

This project was a gridded self portrait with a background inspired by art history. The first step was to grid a photo of ourselves that we printed out and grid the piece of paper that we were given. The squares were 1" by 1". Once this was done I could begin the self portrait using graphite. I used a view finder and went square by square starting at the top of my head and working my way down the page. Once I was done with the self portrait I moved on to researching what I wanted to do for the background. I knew I wanted to base it off of pop art so I chose to research Roy Lichtenstien. The background was inspired by some pop art landscapes that he did that used dots like in comic books for some of the colors. The materials I used were a couple different pencils for the self portrait part and then some sharpies and other markers I had for the background. I used a tortillon to blnd all of the graphite for the portrait.

Drawing the self portrait was very difficult and I had trouble getting the face shape and the eyes right. The first eye was pretty easy to draw and turned out well but then the second eye kept turning out weird or crooked. I worked on the eyes for way too long and ended up changing the first eye in order to make it look symmetrical. The finished drawing looks a little off because the eyes are too close together. The face shape was difficult because I couldn't quite get it right but I think eventually it turned out pretty well.

Some elements and principles of art that I used in the background are line which is where I drew the rays of sunlight, color because I used very bold and bright colors, pattern is used in the little dots, shape is used in the clouds, and it has balance because it is almost symmetrical but not actually. All of these things come together to make it look like it is from a cartoon or comic book. One of the elements and principles of art that I used in the self portrait were value because I was only using graphite but in a range of different values in order to show the shadows and get the shading right. In the whole thing I used contrat because the bright colors in the background are very different from the portrait that is not colorful at all. I chose to be inspired by pop art because I like drawing cartoons and I like the style of it, also I wanted the background to be simple because of how detailed the portrait is.