I. Final sketch

Sketch with Grid
For this project we picked a part of our face and we are going to sketch that part of our face with a pencil. This is the main part; we are going to use Egg tempera paint to color our paintings.
There are a lot of objectives in this project. The first objective is using realism. We are drawing parts of our face and our face is a real thing. For this to be a good “renaissance” painting, we have to make sure that realism is alive in the painting. We are doing this by drawing grids on to the photo of our face. This is going to be described in detail further on in part 2.
Another objective is that we are going to try our best to capture value. Value is somewhat a part of realism because it is the shades of grey, which makes a painting, look 3D. Our objective is to use the egg tempera’s to make sure that we use every shade of grey. We have a lot of experience of this value since we have worked on it since we the beginning of the year working on the fish, and I think we will meet this objective quite well.
The third objective is that we are going to be learning about the skills of egg tempera and applying them in to the context of our painting. We have learned while we made practice value scale with the egg tempera that we have to layer the egg tempera to get a darker color. Also we learned about hatching and cross-hatching. Hatching is the technique of crossing and painting the part from one side to another accordingly. Cross-hatching is the technique of adding to the hatching technique with a different angle of painting.
The last objective is using proportion of the face. Proportion also links with the point of realism. If the proportions are done wrong, the part of the body won’t look real. By using the grids on Photoshop, our objective is to get the proportion of the face right.
My goal for this project is to make sure that I get the value right. This is my goal because like I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I have some probably telling the difference between coloring it in the right color and shading with value. I thought it was very hard to show value with a different color and I am going to work on this and make it perfect since this is my weak spot.
I will accomplish this by doing some value scales in my free time. Before you actually do the final project, it is always nice to practice and make perfect your skills before you make a mistake on your final product. This is what I am going to do because I am going to use colors other than black to shape and make a value scale. After I do this, I might also use some of my eggs at home to practice using my own home made egg tempera.
Currently, we are at the stage when we finished sketching our faces on to the final piece. We had to do it with light pencil so that it would look nice in the final product. The stage that comes after the stage that we are waiting to do is to paint it with the colors that we have.
II. Photoshop Face with Grid
This part of my face is the mouth, lower jaw and my hair. There are some parts of my clothes and shoulders that are visible. I chose this part of my face because I have dimples in my cheeks and I thought it would be interesting to try to draw it. Also I thought that drawing my hair would be interesting because my hair is very curly and thick which will be nice to try to add texture to using egg tempera.
There are a lot of steps that we took up until we got the stage of the final sketch:
1) We opened up the app of photo booth on our mac books and took a picture of a place on our face. For me, it was the jaw.
2) Then we clicked on the Photoshop Cs5 app on our mac books.
3) We then clicked on File – New…. we then opened a new document.
4) After a window pops up and we have to change the units to inches and make sure that it is 7 inches by 5 inches or vise versa depending on your picture size.
5) After we click on photo booth and drag our pictures on to the Photoshop app.
6) Then we adjust the picture for it to fit on Photoshop.
7) After because we didn’t have the measurements done, we had to add the measurements in inches. We did this by clicking on Photoshop- Preferences – Units & rulers… We then click on the inches.
8) Now that we have the rulers, we made it so that the photo was divided in to 8 equal rectangles. The measurements were 1.75 inches by 2.5 inches.
9) We “dragged” the ruler to the side to create the guidelines, which is the main part of this project.
10) Then we have the picture all and ready to draw on the real draft.
11) Now we have the Photoshop ready we divide the paper in to the same amount of inches, which is 1.75 inches and 2.5 inches so that we have 8 rectangles.
12) Then we draw using the Photoshop document taking in consideration of the grid.
13) After we are finished, we erase the guidelines.
The grid has been helpful to the creation of my sketch because I knew were things were going in my drawing. For example, I noticed that the lips are finishing at the very tip of the third box on the top and I used this to draw it the same way and as realistically as possible. This helped me make sure that proportion was accurate. You know it is accurate and you can make it accurate because there are different blocks and you can just concentrate on one of the blocks and not all of them.
III. Egg tempera experiment
The pigment that our team used was Cocoa powder. We had a lot of process stages to make the perfect paint:
1) Even though the Cocoa powder was fine I grinded it again to make sure that we could prevent lumps from happening when we would actually make the paint.
2) After this we cracked the egg and separated the whites from the yolk and poked the skin of the yolk to get the inside out.
3) After this, we put some water inside the egg to make it become a creamier yellow.
4) With the pallet knife we put 3 scoops of cocoa powder and mixed it together.
5) While we were mixing it, some of our group members made the test sheet with 4 squares so that we could test our paint.
6) In the first trial, it turned out that the paint was too gooey because there wasn’t much water. We used cross hatching skills to color the first test 1 box in.
7) We added one more spoon full of water to the first paint and we got the second color.
8) We used hatching to color in the second test and we believe it was the best paint.
9) Some of us agreed in that time that the test 2 was too light so we added one more spoon of cocoa powder.
10) We used cross hatching to color in the test 3 square but it turned out it was too thick.
11) Now we had some remains of the test 2 so we added two more spoons or water to test 2.
12) We used hatching to color in the last box. However, it turned out too Light.
13) It turned out the perfect paint was the test 2.
Some things that I have learned about Cocoa powder is that it is a very dark colored pigment. Even when we used charcoal for the pigments, it didn’t work this well while the cocoa powder creates darker tones easily. Also, because the cocoa powder is already really fine, it created no lumps in the paint, which made it easier for the painter to use. Overall, it was a successful piece of paint and I learned a lot about it.
As I said before, the Cocoa powder was very successful and it can even be compared to the other grinded charcoal egg tempera that we have used. Even though these charcoals are used for art professionally even though not for this purpose it didn’t work well that the cooking material of the Cocoa powder. This was successful as well because there were no lumps created because it was a very fine pigment. However, sometimes it would create bubbles in the egg tempera paint. I think this was because we mixed it too much and because the paint was very gooey. This is a minor issue though and I believe that this is a very good potential paint that we should use while we are continuing this project.
Before we did these value scales we also did a value scales with the powdered charcoals, which were of a brown color and a blue color. I believe that my pigment, cocoa powder will be more successful while painting my piece. This is because first of all, the colors are darker for the cocoa powder. You can just tell by seeing the colors of the two pigments. The cocoa powder is of a deeper and darker shade, which means that it will create darker shadows, which is what I need for my piece. Also there are less lumps in my pigment because they were already fined when they came in. However, we find the charcoal is lumpier and creates less quality paint. Overall, I think my pigment is better than the charcoal pigment.
Works Cited
N.d. Photograph. Wikispaces. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. <https://mhsart1.wikispaces.com/file/view/landscape-value-scale-richard-mckinley-tip.jpg/228643462/landscape-value-scale-richard-mckinley-tip.jpg>.