Project 10: Pet Protrait

The pet portrait was the last project I decided to do. I knew it would take forever since I was planning on stippling the whole thing. I did something a lot like this Sophomore year and when Mrs. Rossi said we had to do a pet portrait I felt like this would be a great opportunity to see how much I've improved since Sophomore year. I've definitely improved a lot since then. I knew I had a bunch of pictures of my dog but when I saw this one that my sister took I knew this was the one I was going to use. I loved the angle of it and how you could see all the details in her face. I started off with a light sketch of the picture, I drew a few light lines where the wrinkles were so later I knew where I'd have to make it darker. Once I was done with the sketch I got started on the long process of stippling the whole thing. I started off by doing the really dark areas first, like her ears, because I knew they'd take the longest. Then I moved on to the areas around her mouth and rope. I had never realized how many different shade were there until I stared on this project. I tried to do the darker parts first then go back and do the lighter parts. After I finished her mouth and nose I moved on to her eyes. They were really difficult to do because in the picture she's sleeping so her eyes are closed, but the area around her eyes are black so it was really hard to make it look like she had eyes but also keep it dark like in the picture. But I think in the end it does look like how I wanted it to. I kind of procrastinated doing the wrinkles on her face until the very end, so after finishing her eyes, ears, and mouth, I started working on the parts of her paws that you can see in the picture. It was hard to do them because you have to make it have the value that's there in the picture but also not make it to dark because her paws are white. Finally I started on her face and all the wrinkles which I had been dreading the whole time. I started on the right side of her face because I knew it was lighter and I felt like it would take less time. I started from the bottom by her eye and worked up. I kept going over and making the parts closest to the wrinkles darker so it looked like they had more depth. Once I felt like the right side  was done I moved on to the left side. The left side was much darker than the right side do it took a lot longer to do. There was one wrinkle that came across the white part in the middle of her face that was really hard to do because I had to keep it pretty light but also have to show the value on the edge of the wrinkle so you could tell it was raised up higher. The last part I had to do was the white part in the middle of her face and at the top of her back. I had originally kept it really light but when I showed it to Mrs. Rossi she said it needed to show more value so you can tell where her head ends and her back begins. Seeing it now I agree, it did need more value in those areas. To be honest I was worried I wouldn't finish and I would work on it whenever I could to make sure it was done on time. In the end I love the way it turned out and I'm planning on it being one of the pieces I put in the Hallie.

Project 9: Invisible (choice project)

I've had the idea for this project for about a year now, ever since the song came out. I just never had the time to do it but I finally got the chance, even though it's a little bit different than my original idea. I wasn't planning on doing it in Photoshop, I was going to do it on paper with Sharpies but when I went to get started I realized the paper I had cut was going to be too small and the letters wouldn't all fit. I didn't have time to go get more paper and I knew I still had one more project after this to do. So I thought about it for a little bit and decided that I could do my idea in Photoshop which would work just as well as on paper. I should explain my idea since it's kind of confusing. So this project was inspired by the song Invisible by Hunter Hayes. The song has this message that no matter what you're not invisible and that as bad as you think life is now it's going to get better it just takes time and to mainly just be yourself, don't let others words bring you down. My idea was to take the title of the song 'Invisible' and write it in bubble letters across the page and then I was going to surround the title with the rest of the lyrics of the song but not inside the letters so you noticed the title even more. I started by finding a bubble letter font that I thought would work and typed out INVISIBLE and centered it in the middle of the page. Then I started typing out the lyrics in this font that kind of looks like it was handwritten. That took a long time, there was a different layer for each line which made it hard to keep it organized. When I got to where the INVISIBLE started I had to add a bunch of spaces between each word so it would fill the space between each letter. I tried really hard for the words to not go into each bubble letter. But I realized quickly that it was going to be hard to do because some of the words were really long and would fit in the little spaces between each letter. But I think it makes the pieces perfectly imperfect which I think goes along with the message of the song. After I finished typing out all the lyrics I went back and wherever there was the word invisible I changed the font color to red so it was more noticeable... which is pretty much the opposite of invisible but it went with the theme of the song which I really liked. I couldn't find a font that was bubble letters but was just outlined, like how I ended up making it. So to make it how I wanted I had to go over each of the letters in INVISIBLE and erase the middle so it was just an outline. I didn't think it was going to take that long but I was very wrong it took me forever to do it especially the curves in the S and the B. I think it turned out great, I love the way it looks. It may not have been my original idea but I think I like it so much more this way, more than the way I was going to do it. It looks much neater and sharp which I like a lot. Definitely one of my favorites!!

Project 8: Photograph (choice project)

We had two choice projects left to do before the end of the semester and to be honest I was freaking out. I didn't have any idea what I wanted to until this idea came to me as I was doing my math homework while listening to 'Photograph' by Ed Sheeran.  That song was pretty much my inspiration for this project, in the song Sheeran talks about how pictures capture and hold memories forever and that you'll always have them and they're yours, only you really know what's going on at the moment that picture was taken. Since it was close to the end of 2014 I decided to put a bunch of the picture I had taken over the course of the year and make them look like Polaroids and at the bottom of each picture I wrote a little bit of the lyrics from the chorus of  'Photograph', I attempted to match the lyric to the picture as best as I could. I then tried to put all the picture in order of when I took them throughout the year, like the one of my best friends was taken in January at one of our sleepovers, and the last picture, the selfie of me, was taken one night toward the end of December. Originally I was going to have them spread out all over a table, but when I talked to Mrs. Rossi she thought it looked kind of empty and that it needed more to it. So I was talking to Alison in homeroom and she suggested I make it look like a bulletin board instead and have little notes and stuff all around the pictures. I loved that idea, so I went home that night and I switched out the table background to a cork board background and I added push pins on top of each picture so it was like each one was pinned on the board. Then I made a bunch of little sticky notes and made it look like they were pinned on the board as well. Each of the notes are actual stuff I had planned that week so it was actually like the calendar I have in my room. The last thing I did was go back and make it more me, I guess you could say. Each of the little sticker things are actual things I would put in my room or things that I really like, like the black X is on the cover of one of the CDs I have, stuff like that. I think this was my favorite project I did this semester, it's really personal and means a lot to me. I'm actually planning on enlarging it and printing it out to put up on my wall in my room.

Project 7: Landscape

One of our last projects was a landscape painting. I had a lot of different landscape pictures that I had taken over Thanksgiving break. But when I was deciding on which picture to use I kept coming back to this picture my mom had taken of this really cool bridge when we had gone to tour App State not to long ago. So that's picture I ended up using. Even though we've done a bunch of painting of the course of the semester I still hate painting, I'd still much rather draw out a picture on paper rather than paint it on canvas. I guess you could say I got really bored of this project pretty fast. It was such an effort for me to finish it, but I did. First I drew out a simple sketch of the picture so I could see where everything was supposed to be. I started off by painting the sky and I layered a lot of blue and white over each other. I think it ended up looking really cool, especially in the picture. Then I moved on to the bridge itself. I had to mix a lot of different shade of grey for the bridge. It took a lot of different layers of the different shades of grey to make the bridge look kind of  like it did in the picture. The actual bridge was made of bricks but I really didn't have time to paint the whole bridge like bricks so instead I painted it to look kind of like stone. And I ended up liking the texture of the bridge more than I thought I would. Next I did the road and the shadow.The shadow was really easy to do but on the other hand the road was really hard. I realized then that the bridge should have been up higher so the perspective of the road would've looked right but I was to late, I hard already painted majority of the picture before I realized it which is why the road looks so off. Then I painted the hillside that you could see through the bridge, I loved the different shades of green in the little hill. There was supposed to be tree that you could see on the hill but as I said before I was running out of time so I decided to cut the trees and just leave it as the little hill. I think it would look so much better if I had more time to go back and fix the perspective of the piece, bur I guess it looks ok.  

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. 

Self Portrait

I was really dreading this project because people are literally one of my least favorite things to draw ever... I hate it. No matter how hard I try I feel like I can never get the proportions right; one eye is always a little bigger than the other or the lips aren't the right size, something is always off. I think I spent three or so days on just a practice drawing then another three days just drawing the outline on the final. I kept drawing and then redrawing different parts just to make sure I got them right or as close as I possibly could. I worked on the dress first probably because it was the easiest part of the whole project. Next I started on the hair and it was very time consuming. Since I wanted to do almost everything in black and white colored pencil it took a lot of layering to get the different values in the hair. I had originally wanted it to look really smooth but as I layered the colored pencil it had a really cool texture to it that I really liked, it looked like strands of hair which made that part look much more realistic, so I left it. It took hours and hours to finish the hair I felt like it was never ending. Once I finally finished the hair I moved on to the face. I had decided in the beginning that I wanted to add some color so it wasn't all black and white. When we first came up with idea for this project it was close to Halloween so I wanted it to be somewhat Halloween inspired. I ended up going with a vampire like theme so I was going to make my eyes bright red and have blood dripping from my mouth. Next was the part I was dreading the most, the face. First I drew the eyes and my glasses and I started shading with the colored pencils from the bottom of my glasses up. Then I drew the nose and shaded from there to the spot where my mouth was supposed to be. I practiced a bunch with the mouth but I could never get it right so I ended up asking McKayla how she does it and she ended up showing me how to make it look like actually lips. So then I drew lips that actually looked like lips and finally finished shading the rest of the face. Getting the values in the face was a lot harder than I thought because you had to make it lighter than the hair but not lose the different values that are there. Finally I got to the part with color. I practiced a bit with the watercolors before I started on the actually project. The watercolor really added the color I wanted and draws your eyes toward the eyes, which is exactly the effect I wanted.