value portraits

1. Explain the process you went through to develop your drawing.

In the beginning we had the photo of our randomly chosen subject and a piece of tracing paper and began to trace the outline of our subject. Afterwards, we transferred this to the sketch paper and began adding details to the photo, I thought this was the perfect way to tranfer the shapes equally in relation to the other photo, but also shade and develop the picture on our own.

2. Explain how you found the different values in the portrait?

Originally we took the tracing paper and put it on top of the actual photo and starting outlining shapes where values differed. We soon realized we were missing a lot of values and put them against the window so the light would show through and more easily reveal different values of the face.

3.  Did you achieve a full range of the different values within your portrait?  How?
  Yes, we had a greyscale on hand to compare shades with to help us better determine where and not to shade and how dark to shade.

4. Describe your craftsmanship.  Is the artwork executed and crafted neatly?

 I definitely took my time with this piece and paid very close attention to the details of the face and hair which you can't tell so much from the above photo.

5. List any obstacles you had to overcome and how you dealt with them.
In the beginning of the shading I found myself smudging the shadows a lot with my fingers, but I realized it would look much better in the end if I would just take my time and be patient while shading with the pencil and not smudging the piece. I also had a difficult time with the hairline - connecting it so it flows with her hairstyle and keeping the whole realistic effect in the picture.

light source / shading

 For this piece, the assignment was to use light source as a technique for practicing shading. I think my final piece came out well, but it took a bit of practice. We started off using pencil to shade on shapes and choosing a corner where the imaginary light source was coming from. After practicing with that, we tried blending different oil pastel colors, then put it into action. In this project I learned how to accurately draw shadows behind shapes and how you have to shade with the shape instead of against it, so it really gets that 3D effect we're going for. If I could do this project over again, I would try to utilize more colors and try using colors that don't necessarily blend together on the spectrum then see if I can do some nice shading with that. Overall, I enjoyed creating this piece and am anxious to use oil pastels again and do some shading with other mediums.