Tracing paper skull

For this peace I used tracing paper over a skull to draw a self portrait. Using the skull helped me keep the drawing proportional and place features correctly.

It was challenging to shade the drawing while it was over the skull. I had to outline the main features of the face, then shade off of the skull.

Doing this project this way helped me better understand the face and where features are placed on a face. 

Self portrait

Instead of doing an expressive self portrait I drew myself as a zombie. Some difficulties were making the area around the mouth look like ripped flesh and putting things in the right place. It was hard to place the nose and the teet because I was only drawing the bones.Although it was an assignment it is origional, and it wasn't right from a picture. 

My favorite part of this piece is the eyes. One is more realistic and almost happy and the other is dead.

Bottle Drawing

This was the first project that I used prismacolor on black paper. It was difficult putting the highlights in the right place and using the right colors. Because of this the bottle isn't as transparent as I wanted and the bottle wasn't the right shape. I didn't use reference pictures, I drew what I saw so it was difficult to make it proportional. The bottle was blue, but I added orange and purple to give it more depth and make it look better. 

Skeleton Drawing

For this drawing we drew a skeleton that was hanging on the middle of the room. I used graphite pencils. I feel I gained skill with a familiar material. While working on this I had some difficulty with proportion. The head was too big and the feet and lags were small. To fix this I held my pencil up to the skeleton and used it to compare measurements.

I used technology as a tool. I took a picture of the skeleton with my ohine and used the photo as a reference while I was shading and adding highlights.

Contour line drawing

For this project we were supposed to draw a still life of instruments without picking up our pen. This was challenging at first, but with practice it go easier. I was suprised at how much it looked like the actual instruments when I was finished, and it helped me with other contour drawings. When I made a mistake I tried to just make it look like a part of the drawing. One difficulty that I had was that when you stopped  moving the pen it bled and left big inc marks. I covered the ones I could but you can still see others, but I'm still happy with the finished drawing.

Opacity drawing

For the opacity project I drew two glass vases, one with blue pebbles , and one empty one. I started by lightly outlining the first vase, the adding pebbles. Looking back, I probably should have made the pebbles lighter so it was easier to draw in the highlights later.

Next, I drew in the next glass and added some highlights and blue accents. 

Overall I'm happy with the end result. I used a few reference pictures to create an origional piece, and it was a good learning experience using Prisma colors for the first time. 

"Wow look at that view" point of view drawing

For this project I decided to draw the bakery in downtown Apex. I decided to make it as realistic as possible, so it isn't the most origional piece, but I'm happy with the finished drawing. It was difficult to be consistent with the shading and smoothness using pencils, but the most  difficult thing to do was keeping lines straight and neat. I didn't draw the rest of the buildings around the bakery, but I like how the negative space makes it look simple and neat.