OUIL404 - Colour, Value and Notan

For this brief I decided I wanted to use the subject of Film Noir Femme Fatale's as I thought the dark contrasting colour palettes used in those would be perfect for demonstrating colour, value and notan.

I originally thought that I would use Quink to make my final image, because it is easy to create different values of colour, and I wanted to work in black and white anyway to reflect the film noir look. I thought about adding coloured pencil to highlight certain parts of the image so I tested how well pencil worked on top of dried Quink, althought it worked you couldn't achieve very vivid colours with the pencil on top of the ink.

To begin with I just messed around with the way I wanted to main figure to look and the object in the composition would be the cigarette. I started to test where I would place the cigarette and how I would include the best contrast of value with the different tones of black and grey.

Here I was playing around with using both the quink and watercolour pencils to get a mixture of colour, but I much preferred the black and white as it was hard to get the watercolour pencils dark enough.

Finally I decided I would have her holding the cigarette rather than it being in her mouth, as it was easier to place the smoke in the image and have in contrasting against the dark background. I wanted the smoke and the cigarette to stand out most against the dark so I used all pencil instead of the Quink to get a darker and more even tone.

Overall I am happy with the finished image although I think it would have been better if I had use charcoal or something that would create a much smoother colour rather than the pencil, although I do like the texture it creates.