Justice's Portrait Drawing

My inspiration for this project was the singer/actress Lindsay Pearce. Our assignment for art was to make a portrait. I choose to do a portrait of Ms. Pearce because to me she’s inspiring. She was deaf for the first six months of her life, and then by miracle she regained her hearing and started in the world of musical theater. Recently she won runner up on The Glee Project and this past spring she starred as Wendla Bergmann in a production of Spring Awakening. This portrait is of her playing that character. I created this portrait through the process of gridding. First I found a photo of her and printed it out on a 8½ in. by 11in. piece of printer paper. Next I measured the photo and made dash marks at the edge of each inch. After that I made lines over the picture so that they made 1 inch box squares all across the page. The first step in creating the piece itself was to copy the boxes onto a larger piece of artist paper, but this time instead of 1 in. x1 in. boxes they were 2 in. x2 in. Next I copied what was in each specific box to the boxes on the semi-blank paper. Once I had the outline I went into detail and made it look more lifelike. Then came the hard part: to decide my medium. For my medium I used charcoal and colored chalk. I used this medium because you are able to smear and really work it to move the way you want it. At first I decided to use black and white, and used smudging and gradation to create the shades of grey in between.  I did some research on black and white art pieces and found one where there was a single pop of color. I liked this so much I decided to use it in my piece. So I took a light blue piece of chalk and made the color in Ms. Pearce’s eyes. However it wasn’t always easy. Creating her face was really difficult; trying to make her nose fit and not be larger than her face entirely. Something that I feel I was successful at was staying on task and concentrating on my portrait as I created it. I also feel I was good at balancing the contrast of light and dark shades, which I used for a blurred background. For the final stage of the project, we sprayed the portrait so that the chalk wouldn’t smear.

I was resourceful during this project because I looked up different types of chalk as well as different types of black and white photography. I also in the beginning, took a while finding the perfect Lindsay as Wendla photo. I finally went to the website that was selling tickets for the show and used one of their headshots. I used intellectual curiosity to enhance my project by looking at other portraits and seeing how artists crafted faces and if I saw something that was interesting I tried it out on a separate sheet of paper and if I liked it, it went onto my portrait. This piece represents the quality of the work I’ve completed this year by showing the project that I spent the most time, thought and heart on. I work on all my pieces with a lot of passion and heart, but with this one, I kept revising until I got it as perfect as I possibly could. But there is no perfect perfection. But I worked until it was as close as I could get it in my eyes. Something I put my heart into, something that was special.