Week 17- Composition in portraits

 

Warm tones

Cool tones

This week I was quite nervous for as even thought I love using coloured pencils I usually spend a really long time on drawings as the best way to use coloured pencils is to build up tonal values slowly so that you can get very opposing tones to blend nicely together. We had to do 2 pieces one with the us of warm tones and one with the use of cooler tones. As expected during the drawing session I was finding it very hard to finish and I ended up having to do my cooler ton piece from home from a reference online which i would rather have not done as I wanted to be able to have ago at the task from still life. As I was under time pressure I had to be quite efficient with how long I was spending on the construction of the face. As pencil does not blend well with coloured pencil I was not able to sketch out the face before hand and instead blocked out the features using some warm/ cool tones with coloured pencil. I tried my best to get resemblance of both models. Even though there are some inaccuracies with the placement of the features such as the nose and mouth I think I did quite well. 

For my warm tones piece I chose to use oranges and reds with reds being used for areas of show and yellows being used for highlights and lighter areas. I am not happy with my final colour pallet as I kind of wished i had gone about this task in a bit of a different way. I wish that I would have used quite realistic skin tones but done all the undertone using warmer colours instead of doing the whole piece using saturated warm tones. For my cooler piece I did correct this slightly by adding in some more normal skin shades along with the cooler undertones. I think the outcome for the cooler piece was much more successful and even thought it is not as good as some of my previous coloured pencil portraits I am more happy with this result. For both pieces I set myself a time limit of about an 2/3 hours per drawing.

In terms of how using warm and cool colours effects the outcome of a piece of work I find that using cooler tones creates a more sombre dull atmosphere in relation to the warmer tones which suggest a more impactful and upbeat atmosphere. The use of colours  has an impact on how a piece may be viewed and colour pallets should be chosen in regards to what atmosphere the artist is trying to create. I do like  how the cooler tones give the piece a more refreshing look in comparison to the almost harsh and suffocating warmer tones. 

I had to finish my warmer tones piece at home as I wasn't able to fully finish it in the lesson so some of my areas of shadow look a bit off as I had to do the piece from my head so things ended up not working particularly well together. I was thinking about re doing this piece of work but I wanted to include it in my portfolio for this term as it was done mostly from still life and highlights areas in which I need to improve.