Sustained Investigation #16

Ruel

8.8" x 7.75"

The story behind this piece is about the person in the picture, Ruel. Ruel is one of my favorite artists and he is so underrated. He is a fantastic person and I wanted to draw him because I haven't done many portraits of boys. This project relates to my life because Ruel is one of my are three of my favorite performing artists in the last project I did.

At first I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. So I thought of all of the portraits I done, and they are all mostly girls. So I decided to make another boy. I tried a different angle than most of my other pieces and I turned out to really like it. What I did was, I sketched it out on a piece of watercolor paper with a 4H pencil. I then colored it in with water colors trying to add different shades and color differences in his face. It was really hard to make the perfect skin color, and I still don't think I did it. I then went over the watercolor painting in pen and then I added swirls in his hair to add texture and painted the background blue.

I made this project with the objective in mind that I wanted to focus on color and contrast to answer my inquiry question. I would say that I achieved this goal but not to the extent that I really wanted to. I think my portrait includes texture and movement. It shows the movement with the swirlies and the messed up hair as well as the swirlies also ad texture to the hair. If I were to do this project again, I would probably add less water because some of the paper got ruined and I would also add more figures.