Charcoal / Delusion

Observational drawing, is drawing from the things you see. This is my charcoal self portrait. It was an observational drawing, which means I had to draw what I saw. I was looking at myself in a mirror. I thought this was really difficult because while I was drawing I was shifting angle slightly or moving my hair or doing something else that would change the way I look.

Another thing I found difficult with this piece was using charcoal. At first I started with a graphite sketch of a general face. This helped me get a feel of what I needed to end up with. I then looked at the mirror and tried to make it look more like me. Once I finished drawing myself with the graphite, I began to use charcoal. This was really hard, because it smudged really easily. I rested my hand on a piece of paper so it didn't run the charcoal. After each part I used a tortillon to blend the charcoal. Charcoal was much easier to get really dark than graphite was. On the really dark parts, like my shirt I had to do multiple layers.

I wanted to add some color to it. After I finished it I used colored pastels and colored pencils and to make the blue, orange, and yellow surrounding.

This next assignment was an introduction to using ink. I was given mannequins that i could set up in different positions. I then drew them in graphite. One had to be vertical. One had to be horizontal. One had to be diagonal.

The first one I drew was the horizontal one. I drew it to look like it was running. I am on my schools track team so running is something I thought of to do quickly. I drew this one kind of big so I tried to make the next ones smaller. The next one I did was the vertical one. I did this one to look like it was sitting down. I didn't really have a reason I just thought it was a cool idea. The last one I did was diagonal. I just did this one standing up straight with arms sticking out.

For the ink part I had an a stick with a sharp metal tip. I also used a bottle of ink. Dipped the point in the ink and the traced over my graphite lines. The harder I pushed and the more ink that was on the "pen" the darker it was. For the shading, I either dotted of cross hatched. The dotting is just making little dots in the darker areas and the more dots used the darker the area would be. The other method was cross hatching. I made small lines or hatches and then went in the opposite direction to make the cross hatching. The closer the lines were the darker the shading was.

I wanted to put something in the background so there wasn't so much negative space. I started by drawing the shadow of the running one. My looking where the light would be coming from I drew the shadow. I didn't know how to do this for the other ones so this was the only one with a shadow. I drew flowers and green swirls like grass. I did some blue with a brush and did a kind of random pattern as sky. The one with its arms out I thought looked like it was kind of flying so I surrounded it with stars and dark purple. I used a stencil to make my stars match. The last one I was kind of out of ideas but I like the brush marks I made on the other ones. So I did it with a pinkish purple color.