What I've Been Up To in Drawing Class! Social Justice Illustration and Paper Bags

If it is possible to despise a project as much as you love it, I'm sure I do. I am so excited to see the end of this Social Justice Illustration because I HATE working through the process and coming up with ideas and fighting for the parts of the picture to work together, but because I've been working on it with such frustration, I am looking forward to see what the end product looks like. I think it will be pretty amazing. Here is a bit of my process. WARNING: its been a long one.

A horribly drawn version of the "general idea" of the illustration. A frightened woman with an abusive man's hand over her mouth. The triangle type shapes represent glass, which represents the fact that she is a fragile human being. The glass is punched out around her eye, and he is covering her mouth above the glass, representative of the fact that he is breaking her down. 

I did some pretty interesting sketches of women and different types of eyes on vellum. Vellum is like tracing paper but more velvety.

More interesting but pointless sketches of eyes and glass. I was floundering around for a few days because I was having difficulty gathering my thoughts. I play with my kneaded eraser a lot in class. 

I found some broken glass that I really liked so I spent an entire class period (almost three hours) drawing this glass bigger.

Then I took a picture of my hand, and made it look like a creepy man's hand. That was an interesting process. Plenty of erasing. 

This is where it starts to get a little creepy. I had a really hard tim breaking up the glass and drawing the difference between the figure and the ground. The hand is my favorite though :-)

This is the last update I have. The grey background was done in chalk. I'm probably going to end up cutting out the glass and the hand, etc, and gluing it on gray paper. I think it will turn out cleaner that way. The chalk tends to smudge.

NEXT IS THE PAPER BAGS.

I really don't like those things.

So I started out on white paper using regular charcoal, because I am afraid of commitment and starting cold on the final gray paper was a really scary thing for me.

For an entire class period, I worked out the shapes of the bags, the shadows and their placement. Finally it was finished on the white paper and I forced myself to go on to the final paper.

This is a good picture of the blocking in process. The point of a picture with this much value is to see the whole picture before each of the parts, or each bag. Therefore when I started with the picture, I did the lines, but then I blocked in all of the white, then all of the gray, then the dark gray, etc. Its nowhere near done, but I'll be sure to post when it is!