8 ADV ART & PORTFOLIO - Ensley

2/22
I finished my Ensley Project! - I am only calling it the 'Ensley Project' because I don't have a name for it. Overall, I'm extremely unsatisfied by the project, but I am not disappointed because I pretty much knew that I wouldn't reach my goal in this project. It was really complicated but I don't think my time went to waste-- I love the concept and also, now that I have done it once, I think I know how to do it correctly! If I did this project one more time, I think it would turn out much, much better. I know how to improve, but there are some things I don't really know how to correct. Yet I digress.
The entire idea of this project was the play with light and layers. Basically, I divided her face by tone. I labeled the lightest tones in her picture by '1' and the second darkest as '2' and so on. I ended up going all the way up to about 8 I believe. Afterwards, I started painting. I used the same color of diluted black acrylic paint in every layer-- the only thing that determined how light/ dark the paint came out was the layer that they were put in. I painted the lightest layer first (number 1), let it dry, and then painted a couple thin layers of white gesso over it. I repeated the process with all the numbers except for the last one. I have no idea if that makes sense to anyone, because the project is actually really complicated and even I had a lot of trouble with both explaining and making the painting.
Here are some pictures.

If I were to do it again, I would use gray instead of black. I think black was too dark and I ended up diluting it, which made uneven shades. Also, if I had used straight black like I originally intended, it would have been too dark and it would have taken several several layers of white gesso to cover it up. It also just feels too dark, which messed me up. Maybe I would make the last layer (the layer I don't cover up) black, though.
I would also use several different layers of tracing paper (according to the numbers..so there would be one layer of tracing paper for each number) so it would be like a physical representation of the layers.  For this project, I used one sheet of tracing paper for the entire project and I found that it became very messy and complicated, especially because I was continually marking it each time I was working on a layer.
In addition, I would not separate the layers like I did. Instead, I would build on it. For example, for the first layer, I would not only paint the places I marked as '1,' but I would also paint every other layer (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). For the second layer, I would paint every number from 2 and up. I would continue this with every number/layer so that the tone would be more distinguished and dark.
Lastly, I would make the edges softer. I need to blend, blend and blend. In this project, I cut everything into shapes depending on the shade which really distorted Ensley's face. I should have made the shadows flood into her face and fade away like the real image. I feel like the only reason I didn't blend was because I didn't really know how, especially because I'm not just straight blending: I'm blending one layer to another, and it's hard when you don't have the things your blending together (in the same place). But I think I know how to do it now. You kind of just fade out instead of making straight, abrupt edges.
That's it.
Bye