Final Project

     For my final project I did a series on hot air balloons drawing. I originally got the idea when I saw a picture of a really color hot air balloon. I knew I wanted to create a piece with a lot of focus with everything black and white but the focal point. Initially I couldn't decide whether to do my picture of a person letting go of a helium balloon or a colorful hot air balloon floating over a bleak mountain range. In the end I chose the latter of the two options because it I thought it would be more dramatic and eye-catching.
     I knew that I wanted to draw it with pencil because that is what I'm most comfortable using but as for the balloon I was undecided on whether to use paint, color pencils or pastels. I started out by doing a sketch of what I wanted it to look like in my notebook and then proceeded to doing a light sketch on my final paper. I used a long and narrow piece of paper to give the effect that the hot air balloon was really high up. I had some difficulty at first bringing out the darks in the mountains and so I switched to using a "B6" pencil and this really helped me give my piece more contrast. I then went on to draw the hot air balloon using a rainbow of brightly colored, colored pencils. The balloon turned out looking really two dimensional though so I went back the next day with a white color pencil, adding value to it. It is now my favorite part of my piece.
     I finished up my first picture pretty early and so I had time to make another drawing. I decided to keep to the theme of focus and hot air balloons, but this time from the point of view of inside the balloon basket. I didn't have as much time to make this one as the first one though and it turned out a bit rough.
     The next class we had an in-class critique. I started off by talking a little about my pieces and the process I went though to create them. After I finished people told me what they liked and what could be improved. They liked the focus and the hot air balloon on the first one but thought that there could have been even a little more contrast so it wasn't quite as grey.

Light can symbolize hope and life. Light plays a really big role in the winter when it is so scarce. One time when my family and I was on the beach and it was a little cloudy out there was a really cool looking shaft of light coming down through a cloud. This was awesome because it looked like something that could be in a painting but not in real life. Another time that light was really dramatic was when we were in Maine and there was so little light pollution that the stars looked incredibly bright.