My idea for this project was to portray one of my hobbies, playing the piano, in a unique and different way. My piece uses my own ideas because I took pictures of my keyboard at home in different perspectives and compositions to help me throughout this project. Also, I added something different to create a new composition; I added a colorful rose to a black and white drawing to add a pop to the piece and make it more interesting.
Throughout this unit, I learned new ways to shade with pencil, apply values to colored drawings, and create more realistic perspective drawings. The first technique I was able to learn more on and improve in was drawing in perspective. I got to test out new tricks and draw out many objects from small to large and objects that are close up and father away. I practiced looking carefully at an object and drawing what I see instead of what I thought that object should look like and add shading correctly. Shading was another huge part in the process of this project and I am now able to create the different values from light to dark better than what I did before. Using pencil as a main media was not completely new to me and was always one of my favorites but now I am much more familiar with it than I was and can make objects more realistic and three dimension using the correct values and shading techniques. The last technique I learned was adding value to colored drawings. I was not familiar with this media and did not know how to create shadows and values to make an object more realistic using colored pencil. This project allowed me to explore that media more.
Before starting to draw my piece, I planned out what I was going to do by taking photos of a piano in the perspective I wanted to draw the keys. I also created different compositions to take pictures of and this helped me see how it would all look on paper. My first idea was to create many keys in perspective but after my first sketch I noticed that this idea did not look as good as I would have like it to. After doing a few more sketches, I decided my best option was to draw a few keys up close. I felt this looked nicer and neater. I drew a larger version of this idea but it was very interesting and that is why I came up with the idea to add an object with the keys, which ended up being the rose. As I was working on my final piece, I would often to a break to step back and look at how my drawing looked and see what needed improvement. Taking a step back to look at it helped to analyze what really needed to be improved and see how others would be looking at my work.
This project turned out to be fun in my opinion because I got to somewhat challenge myself and use one of my favorite medias. I also found nice to be able to ask others around me about what they thought of my work and give me feedback on what they thought should be improved or what already looked good. Overall, I found my piece to be a success.
