Sustained Investigation #9

My ninth sustained investigation is another self portrait. It is the left side of my face done in a grayscale. This is a self portrait because I don’t have many pictures of people and I’m not that good at creating faces from my imagination, so I just took a picture and copied that. It is a portrait of me so there is a connection between myself and the subject of the art.

I used ink to create this painting. I mixed black and white to get different shades of gray and I used white to highlight areas. I did not mix the background color because I needed so much of it, it would have been difficult to remain consistent with my color if I was mixing it as I went. I painted on the backing of a sketchbook. The cardboard is stiff enough that it doesn't warp and the ink doesn’t saturate it. This material is also not new so by painting on it it is reusing the cardboard.

This project was made with value in mind. I was trying to break down the portrait into areas where there was only one value. I tried to not blend between two values so there were clear distinctions at the boundaries of each shade. I was going to put something else in the background that created a pattern, but my idea didn’t really look the way I expected it to so I went back over it. My next steps could be to figure something out for the background. I want to add some pattern or design but I’m not sure what.