I didn't have any visually evident ideas in my value strips but I wasn't sure what I'd do with a pencil so while I was doing the others I was watching Youtube and a video came across talking about Brianna Taylor so that's where I got the title idea from and where I got the crosshatching idea from. I wanted my mixed media piece to look sort of free and fun because you don't see any ground just two pairs of legs and the sky with some clouds. This relates to my life because this was a picture I took of me and my boyfriend's feet one time that we hung out. We had gone to this cute little corn maze that had a farm and a store, it was a great day because he lives in New Hampshire so we don't see each other a lot and at the moment we were just lying on the grass talking and everyone around us probably thought we were idiots but we were having one of the best days of our lives.

The value strips were made by me taking some ink and adding it to the darkest side of the paper and I slowly added more water to make it lighter and lighter. The charcoal one was made by me starting on the lightest side and slowly adding more and more pressure until I was dark enough. The crosshatching one was made by me just drawing a few lines and then as I progressed I added more and more to cross over each other creating a slow fade from light to dark. The mixed media piece was made by me first mapping out where the clouds were supposed to be with a white charcoal pencil and then I blended those out, next I added the black charcoal to darken certain parts of the clouds and make the sky contrast nicely. Then I outlined where our shoes and legs are and added details to show the way our pants crinkled. Lastly, the shoes I used ink for mine and white charcoal for his then finished it off with using paint for the shoelaces.

To create the value strips I had to look at an example so that I made sure to have the right progression and it evolved because with the ink I had to use layers and for the cross-hatching, I had to make sure I was doing the right type because originally it looked like this #. My next steps would be using the techniques from these and using them in a piece. For my mixed media piece, I had a lot of trouble with trying to make the clouds actually look like clouds and I also had trouble with making my pants look realistic but my biggest challenge was trying to blend everything because no matter how many layers I used it still looked scratchy and the lack of a fresh blending stump definitely didn't help. It definitely evolved because I wasn't sure how to add shoelaces to my feet at first and the clouds used to be completely unrecognizable. My next steps could be blending more and adding more detail, also learning how to make clouds.