When I was thinking of what I wanted to do for my final project, I was planning on doing another project with hands. I really like drawing them, and the ones I’ve done in exercised with bright color were a lot of fun. I haven’t been very happy with the mouths I’ve produced in the past, so I wanted to focus on that instead. I took a few pictures of my face for reference, then sketched them on to some paper. I’m still not sure if I want to do this in acrylic or digital, but I’m leaning towards painting the piece.

The idea would be to color the different mouths to match the emotion that those colors could be conveying. Since body language conveys a lot of meaning, I’m hoping I can take the shape of the mouth, and further detail the emotion with color. In our color temperature exercise, we went over which emotions are associated. I think that I would like to paint them monochrome or two-tone expressive. I think that two tone could make some good combinations.

The following are what I’m currently considering for color combos:
Top Left: Yellow and Orange to show happiness with a bit of  excitement
Top Right: Bright red with Orange, intense glow for anger
Bottom Left: Green and Purple, this should clash more than the others and hopefully convey disgust or fear, just general discomfort
Bottom Right: Green and Blue, Calm, relaxed.

I plan to use a few hues of each color, and use them for the mustache if I decide to keep it in.

Since I want to use for mouths to evenly fill up the board, I’m going to use the rule of thirds to position them, since the rule of odds will be out. I think that it will lend itself well to a white background, but even if it doesn’t , I’ll have a easy time applying one afterwards. I’ve been having a better time with black paint for outlines. I’m starting to get a lot more comfortable with my brush strokes which is a relief.

I  really like having these bright colors on the white background. It makes everything look really crisp. I think I’m going to do the same this with the mouths. I started drawing the cheek lines, but I think I’m going to get rid of them. I’m going to just use the lip shape and mustache to give the mouth dimension. I didn’t have very much shading on my sketch, but that’s something I plan on really working in once I am ready to paint. I hope to use the two tone for expressive color shading. Facial hair is another thing that I’ve always had a hard time with, so hopefully I can tackle it here. I was happy with how the ‘stache looked in my reference photos, individual whiskers had a lot of variance in their brightness. Hopefully with some appropriate colored paint I can recreate the whiskers.

I’m excited to get started on this now that it’s all planned out.