Drawing Final Exam

1.

     I feel like my most successful work of art this year was this one, the teddy bear in colored wrapping paper.  We had to do things that we could see through, and I thought it would be fun to try something that was tinted, especially since we were using Prismacolor pencils, which blend together nicely.  I started by getting my sources by setting up a teddy bear with wrapping paper and taking pictures of it.  I then practiced drawing the setup on different colored pieces of paper to see what it would go best on, and finally decided on a light beige.  I spent the most time working on the part of the bear wrapped up in wrapping paper, trying to get the darks and highlights correctly and to get the shape of the bear barely visible underneath.  I also wanted to make sure I got the colors right so that it looked like it was still the same bear underneath.  I took at least three days working on that bit alone.  I didn't get to spend as much time on the ribbon wrapped around the bear, which I feel looks very flat and isn't shaded well at all, not having enough volume in the drawing.  Besides that, I feel like the rest of the layout turned out well and the bear wasn't too big or small in the overall picture.  Overall, I liked this project best and really enjoyed using the Prismacolors and blending with them.  

2.  

     My least successful project this semester was probably by self-portrait.  This is because it doesn't really look like me and the shading didn't really turn out the way I hoped it would.  The chin looks too big and the proportions don't really appear correct, although I did measure everything out using one of my eyes as we had learned.  The only thing I liked was my hands, but the rest didn't turn out very good at all.  I would probably make the chin smaller and make the lips lighter, which seem to be way too dark.  I might also change the placement of my left hand so that it isn't covering part of my eye, because that made it a bit harder to draw the eye and make sure it remained the same size.  It appears to be a big bigger than the other eye, and I wasn't really sure how to work out a shadow underneath my finger to appear on my eye.  I would also try to learn how to draw noes more realistically.  I felt like the nose didn't look quite right, but I wan't really sure how to fix it.  Overall, this was probably my least successful project in this class.  

3.  

     These are two pieces from throughout the semester.  The first is an apple that I drew on the first day of class, and the second is a homework assignment that I did a bit later on.  In the first piece, I hadn't even learned how to really shade since I had only taken Art 1, in which I didn't learn much.  The highlights and dark spots and random and don't flow into each other, making the apple look very unrealistic.  By the second piece, I had learned how to shade and control my pencil, creating different textures and angles in the picture.  I knew to gradually get lighter and darker in order to make it look more realistic, and how to use my darkest darks to really bring out certain areas.  I had come up with the composition on my own as well, using my own live reference for it and taking pictures as well in order to get a better idea of how to draw the different regions.  Overall, I feel like I have grown a lot over the semester in my work and have learned a lot about drawing.  

4.  

     The lessons I felt were most beneficial to me were the ones in which we worked with blending with both Prismacolor pencils and when we worked with pastels.  This was because this really helped to figure out how integrating different colors that you can't even see in certain things can really bring life to a picture.  For example, adding blue and yellow to the green candies helped to add more life to them and make them look a bit more realistic.  These also helped to learn about blending in general and how to draw in certain shapes in order to portray the shape of objects.  Working with the pastels in particular helped to show how to blend with not just the movements of the pastel, but by using something else to help move the colors together and create a nice effect.  I believe that enough instruction was given for both of these lessons.  We simply had to learn how different colors can work very well together and had to try and see colors that weren't visibly there.  

5.  My favorite medium to work with this semester has been Prismacolor pencils.  This is because I really love working with color and integrating it into my work.  I loved how bright the pencils turned out on paper and the way they stood out beautifully.  It was fun to blend colors together to create different illusions of layers and to create different textures with different patterns of color.  One of the few downsides was how hard it was to erase when it wasn't used lightly, but it was easy to apply lightly first to be sure that it looked alright before going in and darkening it.  There were so many different colors in the boxes, creating many different possibilities for combinations and different ways to portray one drawing.  All in all, I really loved working with the Prismacolor pencils.