Hello, welcome to Cave to Canvas! This blog with go follows the process I go through to start an art piece, such as planning, drafting, reference selection; along with techniques such as color theory and planar analysis.

Step one: Motivation & Inspiration
  Waking up and deciding to create is the first step to creating any piece. Personally, I have a huge white wall that I pin my drawings into and noticed that my art seemed to be suffering from “same-face syndrome.” And lacked some diversity in terms of face shape. Drawing me to seek out references that were contrasting from my home gallery. In terms of your own personal inspiration, it can leak out of anywhere, usually, I will usually go to places to observe people but due to covid-19 guidelines that method is not sustainable. So, during this time you should turn to the internet, it’s full of different many different people from around the world, movie scenes, music, and is the citadel for inspiration in these trying times.

Step two: Reference & Medium Selection
Pinterest is my personal favorite for references as they compile photos from many different websites into one manageable site. I already have an entire folder dedicated to many. Other than finding a reference it’s important to know what makes a good reference, which I have narrowed down to a simple checklist.
-It’s not over or underexposed
-It has a good balance between bounce light and direct light
-It’s not blurry
-No filters or lens distortion (depending on the realism of the piece)
– “I am excited to draw this”
As for medium selection, I was worn out and wanted something with little clean-up, so I just chose to do it in graphite.

Step 3: Planning
Composition skills are very important because it makes the piece easy to follow with the eyes. If you learn the guidelines of art, you can break them according to what you’re creating. Such as caricatures that distort human anatomy in order to create a cartoonish style. Things such as the rule of thirds and the rule of odds also help keep the subject matter in alignment and easy to follow. Since this piece is a simple graphite drawing with no background there aren’t as many rules to follow as opposed to if a was painting a whole background. I did draw over a printed version of the reference to chart out the planes of the face which will help give the final product more depth and make it look 3d.