Scholastics #4

For this fourth scholastics piece I was inspired by a piece of artwork that my friend showed me online. I decided to take this picture and draw it in my own style using charcoal and acrylic paint. Starting out I wanted to use just acrylic so I made this piece on canvas, but as I went along I thought that this piece might be better with charcoal. That being said I had already started and didn't want to do everything from the beginning so I drew with charcoal on top of the canvas. This proved to be a bit of a challenge because charcoal isn't made to go on the bumpy surface of canvas. The piece needed copious amounts of fixative in between each layer of charcoal. I outlined the skull and the different features that I wanted to include in my piece. From there I went into putting a base layer of charcoal and then shading and adding highlights with white charcoal. I outlined the features again with red paint so they would be more noticeable to the viewer. For the background I used multiple layers of red paint to tie in with the outline and the blood on the skull. Then I added dark charcoal circle to the red background in order to play with space and pattern.

When sketching this piece, the outline of the skull had some sharp lines in order to make it bolder. Some of these lines I ended up smoothing out so it looked more realistic. Red was the only color I used in this piece and in contrast with the dark skull, it looks very bright and bold. I played with the texture in some places of the skull by blotting a paper towel on the piece right after spraying a layer of fixative over it. It came out with a cool pattern in certain areas as it stripped all the charcoal off in those spots. The red outlines help emphasis the feature of the skull that otherwise would have been lost in the dark shadows.