The mood I’ve chosen for this project is “Surprise”. I decided to have the focal point(s) be the eyes, with the darker outlines highlighting them. Additional details like the raised eyebrows and gaping mouth were added to emphasize the emotion.

To me, a surprised emotion usually involves something that blows your mind away, so I added bits and pieces of my own head doing just that. I placed it in an upwards movement to recreate that scattered and blown-up metaphor, all the while using the eyebrows to guide viewers toward that same motion.

In this project I learned the importance of expressing emotion in a visual context without it being so obvious (ex: emojis). I think the concept of the mind blowing up was translated well enough, with other visual cues (eyes and mouth) giving hints as to what expression is being made. I think the unsuccessful part of this project was how little of the grey scale was in this piece. Yes I added pieces that built up towards the darker ends of the scale, but a majority of the work is dominated by the lighter end of the scale (ex: the face), whereas the darkest part of the scale is in the hair. This, I feel, leaves plenty of negative space surrounding the picture.