Scholastic Project #4

NO TRESPASSING

DEC. 5, 2018 — acrylic and pen

In this project, I continued to work on my concentration (which will eventually be submitted to Scholastic).

I had some difficulty with this project. Initially I planned to create an image that was a view of a city from high up, but after sketching and inking it, my attempts at painting went awry. So I abandoned that idea and attempted another one, which ended up being a sort of pastoral image; a clothesline with clothes hanging from it, some tree branches extending into view, and the sun setting behind a couple of mountains/hills. Of course, after sketching out and inking this one, I tried to paint it—and, of course, that didn't work out as planned. The colors were messed up and bleeding everywhere, and overall it was just ugly, so I ditched that idea as well. Finally, I decided that the thing that was messing me up was the colors (I was having a pretty rough time picking colors and making them look good together, for some reason) so I opted to make a monochrome image on toned paper. I picked out some paper that was a sort of tan/beige color, sketched out a forest with some creepy things, and used a pen to go over the lines. Then, using only watered down black acrylic paint, I added some shading. I had watered it down a lot (probably too much) so it took a significant amount of paint to make the paper at all darker, so this process took quite a while. Once that was finally done, I added some small details with black pen, and then I went in with white gel pen to add the final touches.

This project was a pain for me, but that was mostly my own fault, since I'm the one that ruined two pieces of art. I'm glad, however, that at least one decent one came out. I don't usually work in black and white (because I don't like to), but it was pretty cool to do so and to see the differences between using colors and using a monochrome scheme. Overall, I think that I did a good job creating contrast, and also I like the way that the texture of the grass looks—I should hope so, given the amount of time that I spent drawing all of the pieces of grass with fine point pens. I'm not really fond of the way that the fireflies look (I feel like the light coming from them is too stark in contrast to the relatively dark background, which makes them look unnatural and poorly thought out), and I wish that I'd spent some more time shading, but overall this isn't the worst project I've ever done, so that's neat.