Week of 4/25

Hi All,
This week in your sketchbooks you are to do basically what we did in class, only you are to substitute your facial features for the ones you copied off the board.  In other words, you are to make a self portrait in acrylic paint.

Start out by mixing any neutral tone/color and cover your entire paper with it.  Once it's dry you can use pencil or thinned out paint on top of it to lay out the proportions.  Then--and this is the hard part--fill in the lights, middle tones, and shadows using any mixed colors necessary.  You can try to be realistic or you can keep it mostly about tone.  The key for this week is to make sure the tones/values work well.  Lights. Middle tones. Darks.

Set up in an area with strong light.  You are to include the entire face in realistic proportions and detail (no cubism or surrealism).  Try to think about the face as simply a set of architectural planes. All the planes receiving light directly from the source are the lights, the planes receiving light obliquely are the middle tones, and the planes facing away from the light are the darks.  Include the hair, but treat it as a collection of lights and darks, not as hair as such.  One last thing: don't forget the tone of the negative space!

Week of 4/18

Okay, I'm baaaack!  It was good to see you all (well, most of you) this morning!  You'll recall we made cubist portraits of each other.  What is the difference between a cubist portrait and regular realist portrait?  Shallow space, geometric decomposition, rearranging elements, etc.
This week in your sketchbooks you are to make either a cubist self portrait, or a surrealist self portrait.  If you have questions about what makes either, google is your friend!!!  Below are a few examples.

Cubism:

Surrealism: