Feline Focus - Up Close and Personal

When I was brainstorming ideas, one that immediately popped in my head was a close up of a cat eye. I chose this because when you look closely at a cat's eye, it's so intricate and the pupil tells a lot about the cat's current mood, so I thought this would be interesting to do. I added emphasis by making the eye the focus of the piece and putting a blue color that really made it stand out, as well as putting the white lashes on the picture to brighten up around the eye. I also added a little emphasis when I put some purple pieces of fur in the hair of the cat. I chose chalk pastels as my medium because I've worked with pens, pencils, and some acrylic paints, but I wanted to try something new with the chalk. The chalk was easier to blend and add texture to for this particular project which helped make the picture come to life. I took the risk of adding the white eye lashes and the whiskers on the bridge of the nose and eyebrow last. I was nervous they wouldn't show up that well and would just blend with the other colors I had already put on. If they hadn't shown up well, the eye wouldn't have looked as realistic and defined as it does with the lashes. The whiskers were very hard to make defined so it took me a few tries until the white color really stood out. The characteristics mainly included in this piece are medium and technique. I used chalk pastels as my medium and added so many different shades of brown, black, grey, white, and even purple to create contrast in the fur, and did a bright light blue color in the eye to really grab your attention. I used a lot of crosshatching when making the fur and since the paper was brown, I had to add white before I could color the eye blue. When it was time to add the blue, I rubbed the side of the chalk against the paper instead of the end to add texture to the eye. 

Worth 1,000 Words

                         

I thought of many solutions to what's the point and kept coming up with things like needles, pens, arrows, simple things that simply had sharp edges on them. After I though about it, I thought about point of views and came up with the idea of the point of view from a camera because it's a totally different take on "what's the point" and playing around with different angles of a Polaroid made me very excited. I showed contrast by using a simple black on white sketch for the top half of the piece and a busier white on black pattern on the bottom. I chose charcoal pencil and a white Prisma colored pencil for my medium as opposed to a regular pencil and pen. I chose this mainly because the charcoal was a bit easier to shade and blend with, and was more matte than regular led which leaves a shiny finish; I also used the white pencil because it showed up on the black paper very well and grabs your focus when you first look at the piece. I used a lot of shading in the process of making the camera and played with the shadows to really make it look 3-dimensional; I added an intricate paisley/zentangle pattern on the bottom to liven up the picture even more. I had never really worked with charcoal before but because of this project I came to find that it is now one of my favorite mediums and I would love to do more projects including this in the future. I did not take any particularly big risks, but I was a little nervous trying to sketch the pattern on the bottom half without having to erase and redraw different parts of it. The message I am trying to convey with this piece is that people shouldn't just look at the surface of something when they make judgments, do a little research and see things from all angles so you can get a better perspective on what something is really worth before you jump ahead and label it. The camera itself represents the surface of what we see, but when we look through the lens, we see something like the pattern coming out the bottom that's so crazy and beautiful and more than what we expected.