Realistic Self-Portrait

For this artist statement, I am choosing to write about the summative self-portrait project. For this project, the end goal was that we needed to create a self-portrait with all of the grey tone scales included. This summative project began with us finding or taking a picture of our face that we were willing to draw. Once we had this picture printed out and ready to go it was time to start drawing. Once we started drawing we made boxes that were 1" x 1" and we took it box by box. This project tested our ability to focus on the small details so that we could produce a product that looked like ourselves. Also during this project, we were playing with all the different tones of pencils.

For this project, the materials that I used were fairly simple. The materials used for this project were graphite pencils and pastel paper. The first graphite pencil I used was an HB and I used this to draw the lighter areas around my project. The second pencil I used was a 6B pencil and I used this for darker areas like my sweatshirt and if I needed one in between I would press harder with the HB pencil. Obviously, the next material I used was pastel paper to do our self-portrait on. I used pastel paper because I knew that it was sturdy and I would have plenty of room to do my drawing on. For this project, I used no colored pencils because we used a black and white picture to draw from and so, therefore, there were no colors and I wanted to draw realistically. In conclusion, the materials were simple for this project just graphite pencils and pastel paper.

For this project, the process was rather lengthy. For this project, there was no research done as there were no elements that we didn't know how to do during this project. For this project, the only practice we did was we made a value strip beforehand. This value strip was created because it helped us determine the differences between shades and what each pencil is capable of doing. For this project, I didn't do many revisions except for one. While doing this project I noticed that I was drawing one box off each time. With this being said I had to restart because if I just added something random in the box it wouldn't look right. During this project, the only experiment I did was that I played with the different shades of pencil and the darkness of the HB and 6B pencils in imparticular.