AP Drawing: Exaggerated Perspective

Problem Solving 

I did this piece in honor of 🎃 🎃 🎃  halloween 🎃 🎃 🎃 , my favorite holiday. The skull is the object that breaks the foreground and background, and I added the little mask and pumpkin to (1) act as a size comparison to the skull, and (2) add to the halloween feel. 


One big problem I faced during this project was that I ended up with very little time to do my background. I actually spent a long time on the table, with all of its little scratches and reflections, but by the time I got to the stuff behind the table I was really burnt out. I tried to solve the problem by doing just blobs, but I did not plan ahead. What I had in my mind thought I could do was do this light layer of pastel and then just blend it out with my finger, but then I remembered that we're not allowed to use our fingers. Because I was so super tired I decided to just leave the little sketchy lines I had, but now that doesn't really fit with the rest of the piece. For now I really dislike this aspect of this piece but I think I might revise the background at a later date because I still like the skull itself.

Manipulation of Material 

I decided to use oil pastel for this piece just because I could and I hadn't done them for a while. I think oil pastel's fun. It's not super fussy, blends easily, and it doesn't take a whole lot to layer deeper and lighter colors on top of one another. In fact, I just realised that they're a bit like Crayola crayons 2.0 in a good way, y'know? Anyway, I also didn't make half the mess I made when I last worked with them in Studio Art, because I finally learned to store my little auxillary guys in a paper towel instead of just letting 'em loose in my portfolio. I think what made me really really glad about choosing them though is how fast they move. Once you get them out of their cool casing and into ~37°C human hands, they warm up and almost start to melt a little, which makes them just glide across that mat board and blend like a dream. Now the downside to this is you don't get a ton of definition, but I found a loophole by using this little tool: 

I actually discovered how useful these little tools are last year. You see, I had a little polymer clay phase and bought some clay tools off Amazon, which also happen to work way better than an Xacto knife or a nail to scrape oil pastel. By removing itty bitty bits of the pastel with this guy, I got that thin line definition which would otherwise be kinda hard to get with oil pastel. Also, this tool helped me create the texture I have on the table in the background and on the feathers. 

One last thing I have to mention: it was kinda weird to blend with another oil pastel or a tissue instead of my finger. I mean, last year I used my finger b/c it warmed the pastel up but this time around I didn't have that advantage and so I had to find a color which could do the blending job and it turned out to be this guy from the oil pastel bin: this little light pink one with very little pigment
What a life saver honestly. Props to you little light pink oil pastel. Because of you, I learned to always look through the bin to find a gem instead of assuming that I've only been dealt the 24 colors in the box in life. 

Creativity 

One creative decision I made was to turn this skull a pinkish-purple situation. I remember trying to come up with a yellow color palette and digging in the oil pastel bin for an off white pastel when I came across the pale pink one I mentioned before and my brain just went "holy cats, Batman! Look what we can do now!" and I just went for it. To be honest I think I'm too one-tracked in my thinking a lot of the time but this time my brain was like 'yes, I will take this much better detour, thank you very much". Another thing I added color to were the feathers of the mask. They were just too boring, man. Too boring. I would've ended up procrastinating doing it just because of how boring it would have been. So I planned to add a little blue and green to the mix and bam there go my plans of eating chocolate covered almonds while watching Netflix because of how boring it was. Now I was gonna eat chocolate covered almonds while doing art! And also I think it makes it less boring to look at as well. 

Ok that's it I think. Thanks for reading!