When people think of art, they would usually think of a beautiful painting, a sharp dance choreography, a great piece of cinematography, or maybe a powerful photo that makes you feel something. Not many people would think of the process of creating a finished product. This leads to what I want to do in this article. I want to showcase what the process of creating an artwork looks like. It is important to keep in mind that this is just my personal process and what I usually do when creating artwork and that this would not apply to everybody. I just thought it would be fun to showcase and in a way have you follow along with me with what I did in creating an art piece. Other than that, let’s begin!
As expected, you can’t create something without a thought in mind. For the artwork I will be showcasing my idea was to work off of the theme of a previous artwork I have created shown below.
The theme in question is exploration. As you can see in the artwork above I took the theme more literally and I tried to showcase myself with my dog, Cookie, looking into the unknown with a look of curiosity. However, after completing that artwork I was not satisfied and completely happy with the work I had done. I just felt like I could do more and push myself to do something bigger and better. That’s when an idea popped into my mind.
When thinking back on the theme of exploration the first thing that came to mind was exploring the internet. I felt like this was the perfect way of reimagining and revamping this artwork as it was not only doing something new with an old idea, but with this new idea, I could create an artwork that contrasts the previous one in several ways such as, the medium, texture, mood, and color scheme. When this idea came to mind, the first thing I did was putting all of my ideas on a blank note page. I put down what I want to be depicted in the artwork, a very, very rough sketch of what type of composition I would like to go with, and possible mediums and materials I would want to use for the artwork. Once I have dumped all of the information from my brain onto the notes page, the next step I take is to look for reference photos on the internet to see what type of composition or color scheme I would want the artwork to follow. Next, I write down my last thoughts and wrap up the main idea in a couple of sentences so I can clearly focus on the main ideas. Pictured below is what I did for my planning for this artwork. I apologize if it is not the prettiest of notes you have seen, I am a very messy note-taker.
Just to note, in these notes, I am very focused on how to improve from my previous artwork, so it wouldn’t be completely the same as how I’d do it from a completely fresh and new idea. Now for this artwork, I decided to use a medium I was not the most familiar with, fine art pastels. The ones I used were the Cretacolor Fine Art Pastel Pencils. This technically was not the first time I have used this medium, however, the last time I used these pastels was in creating an expressionist-esque piece which was very abstract where I used very vibrant and bright colors. This piece was going to be far from that, as it was going to be a more realistic artwork. Because of this, my experience with the medium can be considered to just be close to none. Before going into any technical practice with the pastel pencils, I decided that I wanted to first swatch all of the possible shades I might need to use in the artwork so I could go back to it for reference whenever I needed to. I knew in my mind I wanted this piece to use more neutral and cool-toned colors as I wanted one key part of my artwork to be that it showcased how mundane exploring on the internet can be in comparison to exploration as depicted in my previous piece. Having that in mind, I swatched primarily cooler colors, along with a handful of warm colors for my skin tone. From here I tried using the said colors to test and try and make a skin tone following one of the reference pictures. For this test, I tried recreating the nose of the reference picture as it was a small area of the face where there was a big shade range from the brightest highlight to the darkest shadow.
This test was not supposed to find the perfect skin tone match for myself, but it was more so to get some experience on how to make skin tones and what were the best methods to blend or mix the colors. It also gave me an idea of what colors would or wouldn’t be needed as they wouldn’t mix well in creating a skin tone. From here I decided to finally take my reference photo. After this, I then used the new knowledge I had in skin tones to try and use the best mix of colors to create a match for my own skin tone. Once I was content I moved on to finally working on the piece. For this artwork, I created it on black foam core board, which for the ones who don’t know is basically like cardboard but in the middle, there is a styrofoam-like substance in the middle sandwiched by two pieces of paper. From here there is not anything too unique about the creation of the piece. I’ll try and focus on the order of areas I worked in and some possible notes on these steps.
After drawing the outline of my piece I started by coloring in the main focal point of the piece, my face. I started at the nose and worked outwards. I finished off all of the face except for the right side of the glasses where the reflection of the phone screen was going to be. One note from doing the skin, you can see below that I used blue for part of the skin tone. I just wanted to comment on this as some people might be confused. In a short and very simply explained way, the color of the shadow of something would lean towards the opposite temperature side of the lighter areas. Meaning that since skin is warm-toned, cooler tones would be found in the darker areas, and once blended out, you won’t really be able to tell that it is blue, it would just look like a dark brown. From there I moved to the next area people would probably look at, my phone. For the phone, the main thing I did with it was that I wanted it to have a contrasting texture to my skin as the piece shows me holding it. To do this I used a blending stump, to smoothen out the texture of the pastel so that it could have the more sleek effect and texture of my actual phone. After this, I followed up by coloring in the hand the same way I did with the face.
Following the hand, I then moved on to the shirt, and for this, I only used a white pastel pencil and the blending stump. I chose to do this so it would be easier to fade out the star pattern into the shadows. I didn’t want to use a black or grey pastel because those values are not the same as the background and mixing those values with white would make it harder for me to create the fading out into the shadows effect of the pattern. After this, I then moved on to the pillow where I also used the blending stump to create a smoother texture. One notable thing from the pillow was that on the right side of the pillow there was a reflection from my arm, meaning that there would be the color from my skin tone on it. I just wanted to comment on that as there have been many times in which I forget about reflections in the past and maybe other people are like me in that way. Lastly, the final thing I worked on was the glasses and my right eye area. I left this part for last because I felt that once I could get all the other aspects of the piece that I was more comfortable doing out of the way I could put in more care and attention into this little detail on the glasses. I’m not sure if this is the most practical or if it makes any sense, but this is just my thought process and how I had thought of doing it. But with this final step done, the artwork is finished! I hope you enjoyed reading this article and again want to reiterate that I wanted to make this article because I find it very important that the process of creating an artwork should be showcased as many people tend to only recognize the final piece rather than the journey to get there. I hope that maybe you gained some insight into this by seeing my creative process, and hopefully, I could help anyone with their processes. Thank you for reading this, I will just end this off by leaving some more work in progress photos and the final piece down below.
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