Final Sketchbook Assignment (Celebrate)

Celebrate

The theme for this sketchbook assignment is called celebrates. I drew two people watching fireworks. I name this piece “Bright lights at night” because the fireworks light up the dark night sky. Also I liked the way it the name sound because the words rhyme.  I made the image of the two people a siluet because the couple are supposed to be in the dark watching the fireworks. Also when people see others at a firework performance, all they would see would be a siluet of them. I made the fireworks colourful. Each one has two colours in it that matched with each other. The couples are watching the fireworks on a field.

I used pencil and soft pastel to create this piece. I started off by sketching the picture and then colour it with soft pastel. At first I didn’t know if I wanted to use soft pastel to colour my image because I thought it would smudge a lot. I was scared that the colours of the fireworks would get mixed with the black of the sky. I decide to use the soft pastel because I wanted to experiment. If it goes wrong then I know next time not to use it. The pastel did help make it easier to cover the page with colours. I was going to colour in pencil crayon but, since there were big areas to cover, I knew that my colouring would leave darker lines in certain spots. Also I wouldn’t get the bright effect from the fireworks. In the picture I lightly coloured the outside of each line in the firework to make it look like it is bright.

Before I started “Bright lights at night”, I had other ideas in mind. I was going to draw a Chinese new year’s celebration with pictures of people performing a dragon dance while others danced around and lighting up Chinese fireworks but, I didn’t know if I could have completed it in time so, I went with something simpler and drew people watching fireworks.

I had trouble making the bright light effect for the fireworks because the colours would sometimes mix with the black of the sky. I had to make sure that my figures were clean after touching the black because if they won’t, the picture wouldn’t have come out properly. I also had difficulties making the siluet of the couples watching the fireworks because I had to make sure that after colouring the siluet, it wouldn’t just look like a black blob. Using the soft pastel to colour the siluet was difficult to because the pastel would accidentally go out of the lines when I was colouring. Next time I should be more careful. Making the picture look like it was taking place at night was hard because i didn’t have the right colour for the grass. The darkest green I had was to light so; I had to lightly add some black to make it darker.

If I were to change anything from the picture, it would be to have added more detail in the grass. Right now it just looked like a flat green surface. If I took more time in it, the picture would have looked better. I would have also spent more time on making the fireworks look more realistic. What I liked about the picture is the siluet of the couples because it fits in with the image.