"SUFFER WELL"
The Foundation Drawing class had us experimenting with different concepts for a self portrait that utilizes a gray scale. The final piece was to be rendered in ink on an illustration board, but before that we had to come up with the various concepts and do several different compositions to tweak different elements.
MATERIALS:
-Pencils
-Illustration board
-Bond pad
-Camera
-Fine line pointer/ink Pen
-Sketch book
CREATIVE PROCESS:
The project started off with coming up with different concepts based off a photograph that we took of ourselves. After that, it was a matter of creating different elements around this pose to create a new meaning for our self portrait.
Me in all my lovely glory.
WORKFLOW:
Based on the photo above, I played around with different concepts. Unfortunately, I played around with one concept 20 times when I should've done 20 completely different concepts but I was dead set on one particular idea. In the future, I wont be as rigid, (and I'll read the instructions properly.)
Several of my ideas vary slightly but the core idea was to have an animal, preferably an apex predator, surrounding me.
Although to be fair I do like penguins a lot.
My next task once I had cleared my idea through was to get various references for the animals I was going to use. In this case I used a wolf and found as many references as I could for the pose I wanted. No image was off limits, I used real references and drawn stylized references.
This also yielded some hilarious images that I have to share here:
From there I created a small inked composition to work on some of the elements.
Kinda looks like a raccoon here but it's a test after all.
From here I did a bigger scale drawing on bond pad and worked on the pencils to detail the fur and the placement of the shadows. This was going to be the same size as the final image so my success here with my lines would make it easy for me to transfer the image to my illustration board and proceed to the inking stage.
My body and head were slightly off in their proportions but the wolf came out a lot better. I also fixed up certain details involving my pant legs. Off in the distance a penguin supervises my work.
Once I had finalized as many of the elements as I could, I proceeded to the inking portion of the project.
The final image rendered in ink. Pretty sure my right hand was out of commission for a few hours after I finished this.
CONCLUSION:
This project definitely got me out of my comfort zone. I've never done a drawing that large before, let alone of my own face. I also felt an uptick in my inking skills and understanding the placement of shadows.
