Bows

Each month we get a new colored pencil magazine at school and each issue has a different colored pencil challenge in it, where you have to recreate the picture of that month using at least 80% colored pencil. For the November issue we had a picture of these bows that lots of people use on presents at Christmas. I really didn't want to do this one, I felt that the bows were going to take a long time to do and I personally felt that the picture was pretty boring. I started on it like the first weekend in November and I would work on it little by little each day but mainly on the weekend, so far I was really liking it. Then Thanksgiving break came up and I knew I was going to be out of town so I decided to take the colored pencils and drawing with me to work on while I was gone. I did work on it some, but I guess I left it there because when I got home I couldn't find it. I looked everywhere and no matter where I looked I couldn't find it. So basically I had to started all over with only like a week and a half or so to completely redo it. I ended up cropping the picture a lot and making the drawing really small so I would be able to finish by December 10th. First I started out by just drawing an outline of each bow. Then I started with the colored pencil. It took forever, there was a lot of shading to do to make sure all of the bows looked 3-D. The gold bow was the hardest to do because it reflected a lot of the other colors around it as well as the gold color it was. It was definitely difficult to get everything done and make sure it looked right. To be honest I liked the original one better than this one but I still think it turned out okay. 

Nature Turned Mechanical

When I first heard what the topic was for this project I had like no idea what to do. I couldn't think of anything creative enough to turn mechanical. It took me a day or two of looking through so many pictures on Google of the nature turned mechanical projects before I finally came up with the idea of turning a hummingbird mechanical. I had seen a picture of a mechanical penguin that was really cool that inspired me to do a bird of some sort... I just choose a humming bird instead. Before I even started thinking about turning the bird mechanical I looked up a bunch of pictures of different humming birds and practiced drawing them. It took me a while but I finally found a position that I liked. Next I found a picture of a humming bird feeder to add to the composition. Then I started on the final. I drew the hummingbird feeder first... I only really used the basic shape from the picture and then I changed the design on it. This was the only project where I didn't draw everything out first before I added the color. After I finished drawing the hummingbird feeder I added the shading with colored pencils and outlined the design on the hummingbird feeder with pen. Then I moved onto the hummingbird its self. I knew I wanted the beak to be a needle, the wings to look like safety pins, and the tail to look like paper clips, but I had no idea what to make the body look like. Then a light bulb went off in my head...pun intended... to make the body be a light bulb. I decided to just leave the head and just make it look kind of like metal. Now that I decided what I wanted the hummingbird to be made out of, I could start drawing it. While I was working every once in a while I would go back and look at my references to make sure everything looked like it was supposed to. I think for the most part everything looked like it was supposed to. After I finished drawing the hummingbird then I started shading with colored pencil. On the hummingbird feeder I had used regular Crayola colored pencils, but on the hummingbird I used Prismas because there was a metallic color that I wanted to use and they blend better. I didn't add much color to the hummingbird just enough so you could tell where the shadows and highlights are. At first I was just going to leave it but after I looked at it I felt that I should outline the hummingbird in pen, like I had done on the hummingbird feeder. The last thing I did was add the background. I wanted to do it in watercolor. I liked the way it looked more than I thought I would. The colors blended more than I thought it would which added a lot more value to the sky. Overall I kinda liked it in the end, it looked better than I thought it would.