Reflections on 'Hair'

Hair was my ___ piece for my AP portfolio, drawn on a 20 × 30 inch sheet of mixed-media paper. For it I combined pencil, watercolor, acrylic paint and pen, and embroidery floss, using a range of hairstyles as my subject.

I began by practicing my sketching, then laid down each hairstyle with a light pencil to establish soft shadows and shading. Rather than coloring the whole image, I colored only the hair accessories, working in acrylic pen and paint so they would stand out sharply against the black-and-white drawings. This selective color created a deliberate contrast between the bright accessories and the graphite hair.

To tie the separate drawings together, I connected each one with embroidery floss, emphasizing the relationship between the different hairstyles. As a final revision, I added a light wash of brown watercolor to unify the composition and warm its overall tone.