Experimental Portrait Evaluation

I decided to produce portraits of my peer because I found that drawing myself would be the easy way and also I found my peer to have interesting features. I decided to look at Andy Warhol's work for inspiration due to his fame in portrait work and also interesting use of colour. 

From this project, I have learnt better ways to use acrylic to re create accuracy in my portraits and also the importance of shadow and how one difference can change the entire face. 

I feel that my mood boards with the coloured pencil studies of Natalia turned out the best and I am also proud of how they turned out because I am not at all familiar with using this media, especially solely using skin tones. I found relying on coloured pencils difficult because of my inexperience with them but in the end I am happy that I took the risk and am satisfied with the outcome. 

I feel that my final piece should have incorporated the different mark making techniques such as graphite on white emulsion and mono printing. Also, that she should have been facing more toward the front but at the time I had wanted to make her positioning different so ended up giving her an almost profile shot. I did like the outcome of the centre piece but ideas ran out when it came to the background and I daren't take risks due to my fear of it in some way disturbing the portrait that I had taken time on and was also painted (so much can go wrong e.g. Water running and smudging the paint/ damaging the paper). 

I feel that I have slightly improved my experimental portrait skills but still have lots of improvements to make, I need to have more confidence in trying new things and taking more risks, to stop playing it safe with acrylics and simple backgrounds. But I still do feel that I have improved in the area of creating at least semi realistic looking portraits of people that I know. 

I feel that I could have improved my time management throughout the project because I spent too much time on one piece of work, starting and restarting it again in different medias because one of them felt comfortable or right and that made me lose a lot of time that could have been spent on other sheets of work. 

I will never believe that I have produced the best mood boards or final piece possible because I always feel that there is room for improvement in my own work, I have always lacked confidence in this specific area. 

My overall thoughts on this project was that I enjoyed attempting to replicate other atrists' techniques but found it difficult to create an accurate replica of their pieces due to the fact that drawing one line in the wrong place or wrong thickness can change the look of the whole picture and allow the end result to hold little resemblance.