Mixed Media Drawing

The main purpose of this art was to understand and use shading through charcoal and ink. As shown through the portrait of Squeak and the value strips there is a big scale of values that you can get between the two materials. Just like the graphite self portrait another purpose that guided my art was the use of graphing. We used graphing to map out the drawing square by square, scaling to size, I used this to help me push to make use of shading and details.

For the value strip, I used charcoal and ink on copy paper. For the self-portrait, I used charcoal pencils and sticks, plus ink on pastel paper.

When choosing a picture to draw I chose one of my cat Squeak, I chose this picture because I know my cat is older and because he means so much to me. I would love to have a portrait of him to remember him when he passes. I also had to choose a meaningful photo so I chose one of him on my beanbag where I always sit with him, that way it not only is a picture of him but a beautiful memory. When creating my portrait I thought that it would be easier than the self-portrait because I now had some experience with realism and graphing. As it turns out it was much harder than I had originally believed. One challenge I encountered was when I realized I had started drawing the wrong way and had to completely start over, and this was after missing a day because of sickness. Other than that one big challenge I just tried to rely on time and detail to slowly go graph square to square to capture the full picture of my cat.