Process: Summer Project #2 Gridding, Shorts, and Shoes

In this drawing, I wanted to continue depicting hidden and subverted feelings through shoes, playing on the parable "you don't know a man until you walk in his shoes." In order to achieve strong shadows and highlights, I took the reference photo in the afternoon sun. After, I cropped the photo to check the composition and then started to grid out the photo on paper.

I began with the shorts, blending colored pencils to achieve different values of white, gray, and black. However, I wasn't satisfied, as the photo had a grainy filter that just wasn't achievable with colored pencils alone. Consequently, I pulled out some acrylic paint markers to add tiny, grain-like dots, as seen in the photo. I ended up loving these dots, and I continued to add them and use the markers throughout the remainder of the drawing.

After finishing the shorts, I moved onto the shoes. I struggled with depicting different values of black in the shoes, but in the end, I decided to use acrylic markers for the darkest blacks and a dark gray for the lightest blacks. To avoid a boring, completely black and white composition, I added touches of yellow and green to the shoes before blending it with white colored pencil, as I did with the entire piece.