The techniques that were included in Edgar Degas soft pastel drawing “Women Combing Her Hair” were very useful to me. He uses strokes to flatten some areas and also to make them stand out, for example the women’s hair. He also shows that you don’t always smoothen everything when you’re using soft pastels, because it makes things look flat and not stand out, and if you don’t smoothen everything out it will show more value. I was also impressed by the way he used different colors to show the shadows, because he could of used black, but he knew that black was a dull color, therefore he used dark blue, purple, and dark orange. I am sure he used more colors to show the shadows but these colors were the ones that stood out the most to me. So i followed his steps by not using black instead i used dark colors. These techniques helped me so much in my master piece.
The difficulties i encountered during this project was to make the roof and to show the values. The roof was hard to make because i needed to stand out, yet mine wads flat and didn’t have enough squares. I tried to overcome this by making the squares large from the beginning and gradually smaller as it came to the end. I tried doing that so it would stand out and not look flat. To show the values in my work was somewhat hard because i made some trees, grass, and etc look flat by smoothing it, therefore it canceled out the values. I tried to overcome it by using strokes, go harder on the pastel and not smoothen it so it wouldn’t look flat and again stand out.
I am proud of my grass, trees, and bushes because it showed values and it contained more than one color including dark colors and light colors. My trees, grass, and bushes used to be flat, because i didn’t used strokes instead i was smoothing it. I looked at Edgar Degas’s work once again, and saw his strokes, i did the same thing to the trees, grass, and bushes, and then realised that my work was producing some values. On the other hand, i hated my roof, it was really bad, it was flat didn’t stand out and there weren’t enough squares.
After this project i understood how affective planning is. I now know that i didn’t plan well because i faced lots of difficulties such as my roof, showing some values and etc. If i knew how to do this from the beginning i think i could of done so much better. To make my planning better, i could compare the two, oil pastels and soft pastels and see which one fits me best, because i just chose randomly soft, therefore i faced lots of difficulties.
