WEEK 6: Trace Drawing Completed

Craft: After initially starting the trace of the wolf picture, I further enhanced the accuracy of the drawing by giving it more detail.  The tools I used for this task were the brush tool, gradients, transparency, and blurs.  There was a specific brush stroke that resembled hair which was perfect to depict the wolf's fur.  There was another brush stroke that seemed like a smearing effect and was appropriate for some areas requiring blending.  I used a large array of values and hues and thickness of brush strokes.  They ranged from 0.25 to 1 thickness and utilized shades of greens, whites, blues, browns, yellows, and other greys.

Composition: It was very difficult to portray the exact coloration of the fur, considering there were countless hairs and a great number of hues of hairs.  I tried using the first layer of basic shapes as my foundation to the general color in that area of the wolf.  The hair that I placed stroke-by-stroke was laid on top to cover the shapes.  This gave the illusion of a very detailed coat of fur, while not having to completely cover the wolf in single hair pieces.  For the very small areas that the hair did not cover, the shape that lied underneath made sure to act as a good buffer.  Since most of the picture was wolf fur, I had to take quite some time to fill it with appropriate amounts of colored-hairs.  When I was done using the general hues, I moved into more complex values of each color in order to build layers on top of one another.  By using this stacking technique I was able to achieve a lever of three-dimensionality.  After that, I focused on the eyes, the nose and the background.  For the eyes and the nose, I tried to give the a glistening and blending effect while still keeping them very detailed.  This gave a level of life and emotion in the wolf.  To finish, I blurred the background to contrast the foreground with the background and really make the wolf pop out and grave the spectator's attention.

Concept: I wanted to really depict the wolf as accurately as the photograph.  One thing that really kept me from that is that Adobe Illustrator supposedly encountered frequent errors and reached its limit concerning space for my drawing.  There were an incredibly large number of brush strokes that went into making that wolf which might be why it halted Adobe from working properly, as well as the mass use of blur effect.  The real goal of this work of art was to recreate a certain level of realism with human abilities and replicate an accurate illustration of what technology is able to produce through absorption of light (cameras).