Sustained Investigation 1
I decided to use charcoal for this project because I chose value and texture to work on and improve upon so I did not want to use materials like colored pencils. markers etc. I chose charcoal because last year when we did a mixed media project with charcoal and ink and I found that I really liked using charcoal to draw. I liked the range of value I could get when I used it so I thought it would be a good choice for this project.
(9 3/4 x 8) For this project I chose the question of How can I use value and texture to draw animals with charcoal? I chose this question because this year I have not really tried a lot of realistic drawing and I thought I wanted to try it for this unit to improve my sense of value and texture because I think those are the two things in realistic drawing that I think I need the most improvement on drawing. I wanted to draw from a reference so I would have a better idea of value and texture. So I decided to choose a picture of my cat that I took because it had a wide range of value and some interesting and a variety of textures. I chose to this question and to draw one of my cats because I love animals, especially cats and dogs so I though it would be something that connected directly to my interests and could help me improve my techniques. Animals’ fur has a really unique texture and look and same with values so I thought this could be a good focus. Also, I really want to improve my observational drawing skills so I thought that this focus could potentially help me do that.
I definitely was unsure of my question and what I wanted to do in the beginning, but once I decided I wanted to improve my sense of value and texture I thought it would be better to try drawing with a reference so I could focus on trying to get realistic texture. I played with how deep I wanted my values to be and I really focused on the value aspect of my question for this project so I think I should’ve focused with experimenting a little more with the texture so my final product wouldn’t look so bad. I tried to stick with my ideas and everything, but as time went on a layered the drawing and tried to darken the values and layer the texture to try and make the composition look more realistic and like the picture, but I definitely struggled with this and could’ve done a much better job. My next steps would be to continue to layer the values and texture until they became more three dimensional and realistic looking and actually look like the reference. I can’t fix this, but I wish I had not drawn my grid so dark because in some of the areas with lighter values the grid is still visible which makes my drawing look even wore than it already does.