Project #1

I thought that creating the value scale was messy. The charcoal kept smudging and I had to start over twice because I couldn’t get the right values. The vale scale was actually a lot more difficult than I expected because it was hard to anticipate how light/dark my next square would be in comparison to the previous one, I was honestly getting very frustrated by the end of the project.

         The color wheel was fun and easier. The paints were easy to mix and blend. However, the colors didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted them to, the green and the black came out nice, but even with the recommended golden brand paints, the magenta and the phthalo blue didn’t mix to create a different blue, it was very similar to my primary shade. In regards to the red, I thought it was very similar in color to the magenta, I would have liked a greater difference in shades.

         I enjoyed working with the paints the most because they were the easiest the move around the paper. The charcoal kept smudging and was ending up places I didn’t want it, but painting with a small brush was more precise and simple.

The most important thing I discovered was that drawing was harder than I thought. The skill, precision, focus, patience and devotion artists have to create entire works of art out of just charcoal is mind blowing to me. I didn’t expect working with charcoal to be as hard as it was. I came into this project thinking it was going to be so simple but I was quickly proven wrong, creating art is hard no matter what.

         The videos helped me a lot, especially in regards to the value scale. When I attempted to do it before watching the video I was so confused. I couldn’t get my gray scales how I wanted them to be, and it seemed like all my colors looked alike, but once I watched the video and saw how my colors should look in comparison to one another, I made a completely better scale. In regards to the color wheel, I thought it was very helpful to see how the wheel should be set up. I also liked how he mixed red, yellow and blue and showed a muddied and dull color wheel compared to mixing cyan, magenta and yellow (the true primary colors) to produce a bright color wheel. I learned that the true primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow because red, yellow and blue are too dark to be the actual primary colors.