Time Capsules 

For this project, I was given three very specific prompts.  My first hurdle was knowing what to draw but I not knowing how to draw it. "Cropped Self-Portrait" was the easiest to figure out because I already had the subject, how could I not, and I thought that drawing part of my face that contained an eye would be the most interesting. People are often drawn to the eye first out of instinct and I was able to add a lot of detail to the piece just by drawing every part of the eye. For "Hand in Interesting Gesture" I debated for longer (mostly because dread drawing hands) but I settled on the "quiet coyote" gesture because it is an interesting gesture that has negative space. Finally, for "Still Life of an Object that I Depend on" I looked around my room and saw my wallet. I quickly decided that a wallet was not an interesting object because it does not have an interesting shape or details. That prompted me to take a bill out of the wallet, I thought it would be good to draw because it is very detailed and money is something I depend on. 

All three time capsule drawings were done on standaed 12" x 9" artist paper. The "Cropped Self-Portrait" was drawn with graphite pencil, I choose to do this because that is the material I have used for self-portraits in the past. This also allowed me to easily fix any mistakes and have contrast. For the "Hand in Interesting Gesture" I used graphite pencil to sketch out the basic shapes of my hand using circles and cylinders, this gave me guidelines to work off of.  I then went in with a sharpie pen, observing my hand for all the small details and fixing the shapes to match my hand. Finally, for the "Still Life of an Object that I Depend on" drawing, I loosely sketched the head of Jackson with graphite pencil. Then I used a black ballpoint pen to do the rest of the drawing. Other than Jackson I had no guidelines and there was no going back since pen is permanent. 

In all of these drawings there are not many creative or artistic choices made because they are done from observation. Still, I chose to use o few different  methods given the materials I used. In the self portrait  I used a lot of fine lines to indicate the eyelashes, shape of the eyebrow, and flayway hairs. With my hand drawing I used very crated very loose lineart, the mesier lines help to portray the imperfections and natural look of a hand. Finally, with the 20 dollar bill, I used a lot of cross hatching because that is how the image on the bill was drawn. I also had to learn how to re-creat the fount of the writing through observation.