My sketchbook comprises of many portraits of people I interact with in New York. I used two basic mediums for my portraits; both watercolor and pencil because I wanted my pages appear as much of a sketchbook. My portraits contain relatively realistic details, but because I am using a medium I’m not used to painting with, so naturally with watercolor my portraits appeared almost transparent with a hint of vibrancy. My overall experience doing this sketchbook was much harder than I thought because I thought watercolor was an easy medium to use, but it completely changed my expectations. I noticed I got better at watercolor from the middle towards the end because I got used to the strokes and the consistency of the watercolor and realized the trick is not to use too much color. Watercolor is a very tricky medium because it can wreck the painting if overused. Because the sketchbook is so small, I had use extremely fine brushes to define the details with watercolor. When thinking about my large-scale drawing, I think working bigger would hopefully be less of a challenge because the drawing would be bigger therefor details would be bigger.
I want to stick to a theme of portraiture and living in this city, so I chose a close person to me to portray my emotions in the drawing. Living in New York City, and coming all the way from the Middle East, people tend to feel small, when in fact, you are actually so big and important. To depict this, I decided to draw her in a large-scale landscape drawing, making it the main focus of the drawing. The background would be a sketch of the mosque from back home to represent the Middle East. And even further than that, I will draw New York City to make it seem as though it is a small perspective.
