Two Worlds Within One

For my portrait assignment, I decided to focus on something that I feel has had one of the biggest impacts on my life which is the environment that my brother and I grew up in. The point of the picture is to show how close me and my brother were and show that even though we were raised in the same environment, we were in two completely different worlds. So ultimately, the portrait is supposed to depict two pictures in one, in a sense. The drawings of street signs and guns on my brother’s half of the picture is supposed to represent the negativity that he was brought up around while I have sunshine and A plus symbols on my to represent how much positivity my childhood consisted of. Both sides of the split line have love and money symbols which were placed with intentions to get across that we received the same amount of money and love so there was no reason for him to get involved with half of the things that he did. Two of the most important things in the portrait are the figures above our head which represent our mother and his father. My mother is split down the middle because she had to be a parent for both of us while, there if a male figure placed on my brother’s side but not mine because he had a father figure growing up, I did not.

For this assignment, I only chose to use pencil for my materials because I didn’t want to get caught up in figuring out how to make certain things stand out with color. I used different types of pencils for shading and making some lines darker than others and other lines lighter. I had some experience with these techniques in another art class I took a few years prior to this one. I wasn’t able to find the name of the artist but, I found a drawing of a treehouse which to me, represents childhood. The artist seemed to include a bunch of different lines and shading techniques just as I did in my portrait. The artist also incorporated some symbolism into his/her portrait with the flag that has some type of symbol on the right side of the picture. After looking at my portrait and the one I found online, I am able to see how important your pencil technique is when it comes to how you draw your lines and how dark or light you make them. The definition of the line can help things stand out in a picture or, it can help balance your picture. I definitely got to play around with this technique a bit during this assignment and when I received some feedback on how to make my picture more balance, I saw how making a line darker can make such a big difference.

I don’t exactly consider myself an artistic person. I usually dislike anything I create because I can never put what’s in my head on the paper. So, I’m just really proud that I stuck with my first mind and went through with my first draft rather than choosing something different to draw each checkpoint but, if i could do anything different, i’d try to work on the pencil technique a bit more because I witnessed how small changes made such an impact on my drawing. I would have to say that has to be the most important thing I learned during this project. At first, I chose pencil for my only material because I figured it to be an easy way out but, as I started exploring I realized how much of an impact something so simple as a pencil could have.