Up Close and Personal: "Eggquisite" Eggs!

For this project, we had to use oil pastels, chalk pastels, or colored pencils to draw something up close or zoomed in.  I developed ideas for this by looking up pictures on Pinterest.  I found a lot of interesting things like flowers, dogs, pencils breaking, and more.  I narrowed it down to a horse nose and apple and a birds nest.  When I drew my sketches, the birds nest had a  more interesting composition so I went with that.  I demonstrated emphasis in my work by making the eggs the most interesting point in the drawing.  They have the brightest colors and highlights because I used pink, purple, and white, and that makes them stand out inside the nest on the tree.  I decided to use oil pastels because when I practiced with all three mediums, I thought that I was most successful using them.  I've had experience with all three mediums, but I love the oil pastel texture and how you don't have to be so exact but just layering colors and shapes will give the desired effect.  My risks in this piece were just trying to work with the oil pastels in a way that would make the birds nest look like a birds nest without have to draw any individual pieces of straw or anything.  I also had to work hard to make sure that I included a lot of highlights.  Even though it feels weird adding those bright lights and darks and colors, it does make it look more realistic and more like the picture you're trying to draw.  Another risk was bringing my own oil pastels in because I'm so protective of them and I was really worried I would lose or break them!  I used medium as a technique of art in this drawing because the oil pastels worked really well in my picture and their colors and properties brought a lot more to the drawing than a colored pencil or chalk pastel would.  They brought much more texture that you can see.  This was a fun project that didn't take so incredibly long, and I liked it very much!

What's the Point? Popping Perspective!

For our first project in Art 2, we were required to brainstorm ideas for the theme "What's the point?"  When I brainstormed, I came up with ideas such as point of no return, breaking point, arrows, pencils, perspective, and point of view.  I selected perspective and point of view to elaborate on and drew a sketch of a tree from an ant's point of view, yet my final decision was to draw a picture of Disney World using perspective.  I drew Main Street, USA in Disney because it was an interesting location.  With perspective, every line is drawn with a ruler and goes back to the "vanishing point," thus explaining where the "point" relating to the theme comes from.  Also, a lot of the buildings and the Cinderella Castle have points on them.  I drew this in pencil because I knew it would take a lot of erasing and redrawing to get it perfect.  This way I could also add shading to show contrast.  The contrast is easily seen in the road lightening, the black Mickey Mouse balloons, the roof, windows, sides of the buildings, light pole, shadows, and trees.  I tried to exaggerate the lights and darks, but I know that this is something that I can keep working on because I tend to use a lot of similar greys, not "black" or "white".  But that will be a goal to keep working towards.  My techniques for this piece were just shading with a pencil, darkening and whitening areas to give the picture a realistic look.  I did not take many large risks, but it was a risk doing the whole perspective idea to start with.  My only experience with them is two drawings at the end of Art 1, so I don't really know all of the odds and ends of them.  Furthermore, since I was drawing from several pictures combined and it is an actual place, I wanted to include as many details as I could.  With trying to get the view perfect, I ended up taking my sketchbook home every night and just drawing a few lines or squares took almost twenty minutes!  I think you can really tell that the message in this drawing is that Disney World/ Main Street is a beautiful place that is only the beginning of a wonderfully fun and terrific vacation destination!  It was a time-consuming drawing, but I think that the end product is totally worth it because I look at it and see my dream home...Disney World!!!