2.4

Last week I started on a butterfly. As mentioned in my last blog, it did not get finished in time to put it on there. Instead I'll put it on this blog.

It took a long time to do this. Like an unbelievable amount of time. The hardest part was making both sides of the butterfly symmetrical. There was so much detail in the picture I was looking off of, and I had to make sure that both sides looked the same. The color is what really makes the picture look good though. I used the oil pastels again. I made the mistake of putting the black parts down first, so when I went to put the colored parts next the black parts, I had trouble not smudging the black into the color.

Lastly, I decided to do a background. I put some petals under it- like it was sitting on a flower, then I put leaves around it. The background at first looked too waxy, like you could tell it was made with pastels, which gave it a fake look. So, I scraped it off with a blade of scissors, and found that the oil pastels had basically dyed the paper where I had drawn. I continued to scrap it all off until the background was a much lighter color. I think the background looks nice, but I am not sure if it looks better with or without it, so I put both pictures:

I have started learning how to draw faces. This week I drew my first face, hopefully by the time I am done, I will be able to see if I have improved. It turned out pretty good. I really liked the way the coloring turned out since I was able to see which parts of the face were darker than the other parts, then made them blend nicely together. Most of the facial features are also symmetrical and realistic- especially the nose and the lips. However, you may notice the eyes are slightly asymmetrical. If you think they are bad now, you should have seen them before I worked on them. At first I forgot to make it look like part of the eyelids were closed, so it looked like it just saw a ghost or something. It took me quite a while to fix that issue.

Last, but not least, I drew a wolf. I looked at a picture on the internet of a wolf running and I thought it was really cool, so I decided to try and draw it. It was pretty simple to draw. After all, I have started to get the hang of drawing animals. The only thing that challenged me was drawing the head, but it eventually turned out fine. When I was done, I sketched it in really roughly; you can definitely see the strokes of my pencil. It is a bit different from how I shaded in my other animals, but I like it; it captures the spirit of the animal.