JANUARY 3, 2017

In this project, we were tasked with creating a portrait of ourselves—but the only type of mark that we were allowed to use was our signature.

To begin with, we had to take a picture. This was probably the easiest part, because all I had to do was make an ugly face and I was done. Then I printed off the photo, gridded it, gridded the piece of drawing paper, and began to work. I lightly outlined the shape of everything before I started on anything else, and once that was done, I started writing in my signature. I worked like I would if I were doing a normal portrait—I used a lighter pencil for the lighter parts, and I spaced my lettering out more. For the darker places, I used a softer pencil and wrote my signatures closer together. Once I got my shirt to the desired tone, since that was the darkest part, I worked backwards from there until I was all done with my face. At the last(-ish) minute, I decided to add a colorful background, since it was sort of lacking otherwise, and then I was done.

I kind of liked this project. It was a unique idea, and even though I never want to write my name ever again, it was kind of fun. Despite this, I don't really like my finished project. I think I did an okay job at achieving a full range of values, and the face looks like me (unfortunately) but I could have done a better job at shading the nose, and maybe by making my writing smaller, so that it looked neater overall. I do think that I made good use of space, though, and that by adding a colorful background, I made a good decision. However, I can say for sure that I do not want to do a project like this ever again.