Pedro Castillo: Senior Art Q2

Quarter 2 Senior Art was by far the longest art quarter that I have ever experienced and there was a wide variety of projects that were completed over the, roughly, 13 week period. Most of the projects this quarter were color pencil based and all involved some sort of coloring with a colored pencil. All except for the first project.

The first Senior Art project for quarter 2 was a blind contour project. We were tasked with creating, not 5, not 10, but 15 contour line drawings all which had to be completely different. Being a student at SLA, you never run out of subjects to draw but the challenge was picking what you were going to draw. After the contour drawings, we were to practice our colored pencil techniques by drawing spheres and practicing our shading using color. This was much more difficult because it was my first time trying to bring a drawing to life with actual color. We also needed to do a quick sphere shaped drawing of our own and I decided to do a colored skull which was extremely difficult to color since all the different shapes that make up a skull… shading was far from easy.

Next, we created our very own color wheels using nothing but the primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. The difficult part of this project was mixing the colors to make all the tertiary colors in between the primary colors. This really helped me understand how colors work though. The project after this was a colored portrait. I chose to draw a picture of my cousin. After the portrait, we were tasked with drawing and coloring four different fruits and this was by far the most difficult project for me. Not only am I very new to using colors but having to make these colorful fruits look lifelike made things 100x harder. I chose to draw a mango, pear, blueberries, and an apple. Later came more contour line drawing but these required colors. My favorite of these was the drawing of a friend of mine who is building a personality on YouTube and is doing very well. His name is Pingy, or Jonny He (youtube channel) and he is in the drawing of the male with the blue and yellow t-shirt on. Finally was a free drawing. We were allowed to draw whatever we liked but we had to color it as well. I chose to draw a fictional character named Sasuke from the anime, Naruto Shippuden.

This quarter I learned much about colors but I also learned that I need much more practice in order to create colored drawings that I will be comfortable with. I plan on coloring all of the drawings that I do on my free time from now on just to get as much practice as I can.