Chuck Close was my first source of inspiration for my piece. The amount of detail and blending involved in the picture was something I definitely wanted to bring into my piece. I've seen this specific piece from Chuck Close in the Milwaukee Art Museum. It is extremely detailed and well blended, but also huge. I wanted the drawing I would do to be well sized. Another quality of Chuck's work is they are portraits. I didn't want to draw anything more than the face due to it taking away from the meaning of the picture.
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Elly Smallwood is my inspiration for the metaphor of my drawing. Her work tackles modern issues such as inter sectional feminism and promotes body positivity. She claims that her paintings are extremely personal and they explore her mind, body and others around her. That resonated with me due to me wanting to convey similar meanings. I wanted my charcoal drawing to express similar facial expressions such as the one I used for my inspiration. The theme of this drawing is overwhelming emotion, which is an aspect that influenced the meaning of my drawing.
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My preliminary sketch was the one I went with. I really like this picture I took of myself the day before. I had three pictures I was going to base it off of. Therefore I decided to sketch the picture I liked. I like the composition, the tones and different values in the picture. It had potential. If it was done with charcoal it would look killer.
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My last sketch was also not chosen because it was an outdated picture from when I was in 10th grade. I wanted something more recent so it looked more like me. The hair I had in this picture was shorter. However, I really like the angle and the composition of the photo. I was torn between this one and my first sketch. It all came down to metaphor and again, I wasn't able to convey that through, so I decided against it.
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The second step was continuing to add charcoal to the background. This was a very messy process due to the charcoal getting everywhere, therefore I added tape to the boarder of the picture so it didn't get dirty. I wanted a crisp line when I took it off. I continued with the hair. There were a bunch of different values in the drawing so I had to make sure that I was getting every one of those correctly. I used the white charcoal pencil so I could prevent the pencil getting everywhere in the hair or in places I didn't want it. Then I used it in the blackest points of the picture to make the fly away hairs.
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Then I stated the details on the face. I did the lips, then the nose, eyes and cheek bones. I tried my hardest to get the shading of the cheekbones right. The pencil in certain places didn't want to blend and I was getting frustrated. However, I didn't give up because I wanted the blending to be seamless. Eventually it blended out nicely and I was proud of the work that I did.
Lastly, I did the eyes and makeup. Everything was pretty much done in this last picture. I just had to color the background and the bangs and fade it into the background. It was pretty simple from there on out. I used a big blender to get the right consistency and even amount of the charcoal everywhere. |
Between Elly's work and mine there are more similarities metaphorically than similarities in style. Her style is like line work and has no shading or value in it. It mostly outlines what there is to be seen. However, the expression she has on her face of pleasure is similar to the one in my picture.
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