Independent Project

For our last art project of the year we got to choose what to do. It had to include something that we learned during the year or it could be one of the assignments we already did. I like drawing people so I chose the art historical self portrait to be the assignment it was inspired by. I also used skills from the creative color design project because I was mixing acrylic paints and trying to match colors. I didn't feel like doing a self portrait, I just wanted to draw a random person in a style that is almost realistic but not really. I did some sketches of people and I chose to include flowers to make them unique because I had been doing some flower drawings and paintings. I ended up with the idea of flower petals for eyelashes. I did a drawing of a person from the shoulders up with that but I didn't like it. The only part I liked was the eyes and the nose, so I decided to have that be the only part of the person I kept. For the background I decided on Monet's water lilies painting because I saw it painted on a guitar and really liked the colors. Instead of recreating the painting I just wanted to use the colors with visible brush strokes. Because I was using that painting as the inspired background, it made sense for the flower petal eyelashes to be pink water lily petals. There is no border around the eyes and the nose so the pond background sort of goes on top of them and looks like the person is in the pond looking out of the water. I am pretty happy with how it turned out because I think the colors of the background look cool. I don't really like the person being in just pen because it seems like there should be more detail added, but I'm not sure what I would do to change that. Some elements and principles of art that I used are color in the background, texture in the brushstrokes, and balance because it is pretty symmetrical. I also used emphasis because the face is in the middle of the page and it is what your eyes are drawn to. There are some white patches showing through the paint which I thought looked good while I was painting but it might look more put together if I painted over those.