Week Two: Playing With Color

This week, I was originally planning on doing a contrasting drawing to my first drawing but I realized that I hadn't painted a canvas black yet.  Because you can't draw in wet paint, I had to do something else.  So I am such an amazing sister, I asked Sydney if she wanted me to draw something for her to put in her room.  We decided upon a butterfly (because all of her other ideas were way too hard).


To draw the butterfly onto the canvas, I cut out the shape and simply traced around it onto the canvas.  Then I began shading using a simple charcoal stick.  To do this, I taped a picture of the butterfly on the wall above my desk and drew free hand the shapes and contours of the butterfly lightly and then darkened it.

After drawing the top wing of the butterfly completely in charcoal, I decided it was too boring and that I didn't like it.  To maybe solve this, I dug through my piles of craft stuff until my ancient case of colored chalk pastels.  Now, I know I said I was only going to do charcoal for my genius hour, but... it needed color.  I still stuck to the black base and shaded it all with black charcoal, I just added color over the top.

After four and a half hours of drawing the butterfly, I was ready to be done.  There are still a few places that I couldn't get just right, or make the color vibrant enough though.  This drawing was definitely more of a challenge than my last drawing and I hope to just make more difficult pieces as time goes by.  Looking at it, I am very pleased with it and proud of the finished product (and I kinda want to keep it instead of giving it to Sydney).  Tomorrow, I will spray in place so I don't smudge it anymore than I already have.

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2019 at 8:02 AM

    That butterfly is absolutely stunning! I know you said you don't feel like you got the color vibrant enough but I think it looks so realistic! Do you prefer to use just plain black charcoal or did you like working with color? Do you think you would try doing anything abstract with charcoal? I can't wait to see what you do next!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownFebruary 7, 2019 at 8:32 PM

      I actually really loved working with the little bits of color. I would like to do a purely abstract charcoal piece eventually, I'm just waiting for the right inspiration :)

      Delete
  2. UnknownFebruary 6, 2019 at 8:11 PM

    Morgan, your artwork amazes me every time is see it! You are so talented and it's great to see you are making so much progress in the project already. You can really tell that you have a natural ability for art which is why you are probably doing so well. What are some differences with working with charcoal compared to other mediums?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownFebruary 7, 2019 at 8:33 PM

      The charcoal has been the easiest to work with, which surprised me. The color pastels as well as the chalk just don't layer and blend as well as charcoal does. It is much harder to achieve depth in using them.

      Delete

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