I admittedly had the most fun with this piece, because it changed so much throughout my process. I used a lot of new techniques, such as painting with paint on a crumpled piece of paper and using a brayer on the canvas, and was a lot more bold with my marks. In the end, I was not afraid to cover up the majority of my piece and just leave an arrow. For my first time making a piece like this I don't hate it, but in the future I would not push all my marks in one direction and I would be sure to follow the rule of thirds more.
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I messed around with more layers on the foreground and background, but I still want to try to break some of that contrast. I think that the change to a bigger canvas was not as difficult as I expected when it comes to scaling up my techniques to fit the larger canvas. I think for my next project I still want to make two pieces instead of one because working on two pieces lets my mind create more ideas for composition, color, and mark making. Being stuck on one piece feels like its limiting me in a way.
I lightened up the center a bit and filled in with white. I like to fill in with white a little early on because it always creates new colors that I like to incorporate back into the foreground. I love how the texture built up along the edges of the canvas and throughout the white background. I still think I need to add more to the center to blend things together, and make the contrast between the foreground and background a little less aggressive.
I decided to use the thick medium with the base because I felt like it is more to accentuate my marks than to create a thick texture I cannot paint over. I don't like how the base color is so uniform, so I am planning on going over it more next time.
And these are all the pieces I made! I've been off my game and forgot to take progress pictures for two of them, but I will be better about it next time. I love the texture and mark making I have going on in the first two, and the second two I'm not a huge fan of. I want to work bigger and accentuate the texture with my mark making (like adding acrylic medium). I also think I'm gonna go to a hardware store to see if I can find something to use as a big palette knife because I already own the biggest one plaza has. Overall I feel like I was pretty successful with my goals of adding more color and creating interesting compositions and I hope my next piece is even better.
The lighting on these pieces do not do them justice, but I will go into my process. For the first class of the week I worked on the other canvases that are not at my house, and as I am writing this I do not have them with me but I will make more posts before our critique to go over the process with those pieces. On the second class of the week I spent some time mixing colors and holding them up to the canvas to see what I wanted. I like doing this because then I'm left with a lot of colors that I can put on my knife all at once to make things for interesting. I settling on reds and blues for the white piece, trying to bring some of that blue back up to the top. The picture does not do it justice, but there are a lot more blues going on than it looks like it. However I HATE the way the white is looking, and I'm gonna try to solve that with some cool grays mixed with some other colors (yet to be determined). I added some hints of a light green at the end to mix with the rest of the colors just to add some character. On the other piece I just started with some small strokes of red and brining that center color back up to the top.
So I started with one blank canvas, and one gray canvas that had a started but incompleted piece. The incompleted one was just plain gray so I decided to not work with it and just go over it. The colors I put on it were a lot of blues and greens that I mixed that ended up way brighter than I intended, so I layered white on top. I think I was hoping that the white would mix more with the blues and it would be less of a stark white, but it kind of failed so I know I'm going to be layering over that one a lot more. The other piece (pictured on the left) I painted with browns and whites as a worked layer to start with. I then mixed a few different colors (sage green, navy blue, dark blue, still some browns) and wanted to make the shape that I normally start with. I remember Coach Hall telling me to try to make that figure but used the wet paint and multiple colors on my palette knife to make everything more interesting. This is what I have going for these two pieces and disclaimer!!!! I have two more pieces that are not pictured because I accidentally left them at my Dad's house (: So I will have at least four canvases to turn in, maybe more, we will see! I'm just working on as many as I can at once and then revisiting to see what happens.
With my first piece, I am pretty happy with it. To start with the things I like: I love the composition of the dark outline with the white worked back on top of it. With the drips I think the composition is very interesting and unique, and I like how I worked in all of my colors back into the center with a wet palette knife. I also thing I made good choices with adding the paint skins. Now for the one thing I really don't like! I don't like the smooth edge on the top of the white shape, I feel like it catches my eye and makes the piece less interesting.
I feel like I had some fun with my second piece. I played a lotttt with the wet paint, texture, and scraping paint up. I wouldn't say it was a super successful piece but it has some components that I really want to carry into my next pieces. I think it's funny to look at them next to each other because one is so rough while the other is so clean For all of my pieces, I feel slightly stuck compositionally. I am so attached to this general form that I can't seem to let go of it because I feel like if I do then I will be taking steps backwards from all the progress I have made! I don't think I succeeded very well in my mission of using the negative space but I'm not sure, I just want to get more creative with my compositions. I didn't use many washes or play with paint thickness as I wanted because I got attached to focusing on the negative space goal that I was given rather than my own goal, maybe that is something I will concentrate on next time and it will make my pieces more interesting. I added a few different colors to the piece, which took a long time because I couldn't decide what I wanted to add. I ended up piecing together some paint skins that you can see in the bottom left and right corners. I took some of the color from my paint skins and incorporated them into the rest of my painting. I might touch it up and add some more colors to make it more interesting but we will see! I also went through and added some drips. I added white drips on top of the blue layer that you cannot really see anymore, and I added dark blue drips to break up the composition of the white shape.
I decided on my drawing! Below are pictures of the final pieces (excuse my broken camera) followed by a slide show of some of the progress. I loved getting back into drawing and I know it may not be the most realistic or perfect drawing of a plant but it was a fun experiment. I honestly love plants as a subject and might continue to draw them in my free time. I had just as much fun with the other piece as well. However, I had a lot of technical issues with the resin, such as my canvas being warped and it pooling in a weird way, which was a bummer because it looks pretty sloppy. With art assignments I feel as though the goal is to experiment and practice with materials or subject matter you have not used in the past and I feel like I accomplished that. While these pieces aren't a part of my body of work (or don't fit in with it) I am still happy and satisfied with what I made and I hope I get more chances to play around and experiment in the future.
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Julianne
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