M.C. Escher Project - Distortion and Reflection

For this piece, my goal was to create an interesting reflection and illusion. I did this with pencil, a silver Christmas ball, and a little bit of charcoal for the background. This piece is all about distortion and reflection. I wanted to show the interesting reflection in the ball. The trickiest part of making this was drawing my real hand. I had to draw it over and over again until I finally got it somewhat right. It was also initially challenging to draw all the distortions I saw. It was hard to position myself and draw without going by memory. I met all these challenges by redrawing a lot and stopping myself from thinking too much about it. The less tense I was, the easier it got. This piece really works in the hand and the reflection. I've learned a lot about reflection and distortion. I'll definitely try to do something similar to this in the future. I also learned about how cool it can look when you add optical illusions and an interesting composition. My mentor for this piece is M.C. Escher. I've always been captivated by his work and it was exciting to do something similar. I learned from Escher that you can makes pictures mess with your mind. His optical illusions do this in such an interesting way and it was cool to learn more about it. Again, a fellow student that I have learned from is Sarah. I love the way she implements color into her pieces. If I had to redo anything, I would do more with the background. I think it'd be cool if there were windows instead of a gray gradient. I would also work more on the distortion of the reflection. I feel like I could make it curvier. In this piece, I feel best about the ball and the hand. I worked hard on the reflection and I think it payed off. It was difficult and fun to draw my hand and I don't think it looks too shabby. I also liked the piece of paper I drew with the drawing I was drawing on it.