independent project #4

For the final independent project, I made a slightly zoomed in drawing of a purple finch. I made this drawing using oil pastels on bristol board. I did the original design sketch in pencil. I wanted to make some sort of bird drawing or painting for one of my independent projects. I used color and some value to make this work. The bird has color and the value was created by bringing in some white highlights and using some black pastel mixed with the red to darken some of the colors.

I didn’t have any compositional rules or techniques in mind when I was making this drawing. The bird is looking off to one side and the rest of its body is centered on the page. I added the brown color in the background on both sides to balance the sides of the drawing. I also unintentionally silhouetted the bird with the background. This was because I didn’t want to smudge the bird while blending the background, so I gave it some room. This project started life as something I started late at night because I didn’t have anything to turn in the next day. I didn’t end up turning it in and after that I didn’t think I would finish it. This obviously changed and here we are. I had just done a rough pencil outline and from there I just filled it in with color.

I wasn’t planning on finishing this drawing, but I didn’t have any better ideas for a project so I thought I should probably finish it. I have never seen a purple finch and I was planning on doing a goldfinch, but during my search for reference images I saw the purple finch and thought it would make a better drawing than the goldfinch. This project doesn’t relate to my life that much. To improve my artwork I would probably try and add more white highlights to add texture and detail. I could do this with a white oil pastel or by scraping the pastel away and leaving areas where you can see the white paper.