I don't think of a story with the value strip because of how simple it is but I do have a memory that relates to it. I was watching this show and it showed a version of a value strip and one girl make a whole speech about how it's fading from most to least privilege which resonated with me. That girl was right so even though this didn't have a real meaning that's just something I think about when I think of value strips. The self portrait you obviously can see is me but I chose this picture partially because I didn't take one before hand but also you can kind of see light under eye bags and I remember the night before I had gotten such little sleep so I put on eyeliner like I do a lot of mornings but this day it was much more dramatic due to the lack of sleep.

In the value strip I just used pencil, for the darkest end I used a 6h and for the lightest side I used a h and lightly went over it to create a soft gray tone. For the self portrait I used a large variety of pencils so that I could get a good range of color, for the bricks I used a 6h so that I could get a nice dark color but I knew my hair had to be darker so I found a 8b pencil and used that. As you can tell I didn't finish my piece but I would've used my tortilin to blend out the highlight and shadows that would appear on my face.

For the value strip I started by leaving the first square black and then taking the lightest pencil I have and lightly went over the next square and then I kept making it darker and darker until I made it as black as I could. This evolved a lot actually because in the beginning it didn't fade so well and the middle all looked the same tone of gray and the first square wasn't light enough so with the help of an eraser I was able to corrett everything and make it change better. My next step could be applying the different values into a piece of art. For the self portrait I started with the bricks and slowly went left to right and top to bottom. After I finished the hair I wanted to get the outline for my face and my shoulders done and lastly I worked on the face and trying to get all of my features to look proportional. My project evolved by everything lining up as I went down the page and me making what needed to be darker darker and making the things that I needed to be lighter lighter. My next steps could be finishing the bricks and making the face and shirt look more realistic.