Exhibition Text:
For this piece I wanted to accurately represent the colors on the reference picture and truly feel confident in what I had done in the end, because I had not regularly used colors like these before. I also wanted to further understand and work with these colors. For this piece I used acrylic on canvas board, which I had previously worked with and felt pretty confident with. I did not use an artist reference for this piece, I used a photo reference. In the end I feel proud of what I did.
Planning:
My initial planning for this piece included figuring out the grid on the board. I first thought to make the squares on the board larger so that there could be less squares on the reference picture, I thought about it more and I realized I should have more squares on the board because it would benefit my sketching in the future and would overall make my proportions more accurate. In total I ended with 63 squares on the board. Now I could figure this out on the reference.
|
In my original calculations I used the reference photo square size as 2 in. by 1 1/2 in. compared to the size of the canvas board as 9 in. by 6 7/8 in. and then I tried to make 63 squares on the picture having each square be 1/4 of an inch. However, this would lead me to only have 48 squares on the picture in the size of 2 in. by 1 1/2 in., so I just added the extra 15 squares to the end as you can see in the dark blue ink as opposed to the light blue ink. Looking back at the process I could have saved myself time by solving the proportions in a different way. But in the end the only thing that was harmed was my original proportion. I knew that the scale was important to the overall creation of the piece but I was not too far off with my scale and it all worked out in the end.
Finally now that all of my dimensions and squares matched I could start to sketch out all of the color changes. Although I faced challenges in the process I knew that the sketching would also have challenges and I felt prepared after going through this to move forward. I also had some of the lines slightly off as seen in the picture but it did not affect how I went about sketching or eventually painting the piece later on. I also knew that at the time my lines were off, and it occurred to me to fix it, but it seemed like too much of a risk to mess up my other lines that I had already made.
Here is my sketching about half-way through the sketching process. My intention for this sketch was to document the color changes in the reference photo. My sketches turned out to be a little off but I did accurately mark the big color changes on the board. Some of the small shifts in color are off, but it was nothing so irreversible that I could not fix it. Sketching it really helped me to look at the pieces specifics and think about the colors very close up before I started painting. With this I planned to also mark some of the colors I would need for the painting, and I did, after I was done with the sketch I went to Blick and got some paints that I needed, Dioxazine Purple, Medium Magenta, Cerulean Blue Chromium, Teal, and Quinacridone Red, all of which helped to get accurate colors once I started painting. Sketching also helped with the pacing of the project and got me to think about what parts I knew would be the easiest and which I would need to spend more time on. The steps that I planned on taking to get there were: sketch, which actually took more time than I thought it would, and start with the blues and greens, then move on to the pinks and magentas.
Process:
Stage one:
The first stage in my process was painting a little bit of the background black to help with my overall composition. I wanted to paint it black at the beginning because it felt like such a big part of the composition that I could easily accomplish and so I wanted to do it first to make me feel a little better about my process along the way. This also felt like a good reference point for the proportion of my piece that I could work off of. Also I did use straight black for the piece because the reference photo was completely black and I did not want any colors that I put on the canvas look off because the black was not fully black. Also in this stage I tried to fill all the gaps in the piece and make the black seamless and flush to my sketches, which ended up well because I did not go over the black again.
Stage two:
this stage I worked a lot with blending and trying to make the colors look like they all went into each other. This stage did not go well in the fact that the paint was really thin and it didn't go into all of the holes in the canvas. This stage. I tried to do a lot of work with mapping out different colors to come back to later and work on. I think if I went back and did it again I would try and make the paint fill out the holes in the canvas more to make it easier on myself later on. This stage was difficult in that I would continuously move on to different parts of the canvas because I wanted to fill it out and it was hard for me to concentrate on a canvas that did not have a lot on it. In this stage I figured out what brushes I wanted to work with and would help me the most.
Stage three:
This stage I went back in and work more with the areas that I had mapped out in stage two. As seen in the bottom left corner I also branched out and started working on new parts that weren't the ones I already mapped out, I think that was a smart decision for me and it definitely moved my painting process forward. I think that I was a little afraid to move forward with the piece and experiment with new things but once I did it I learned that it was one of my favorite parts to paint because the colors were so similar but so different and making them so close to each other was fun. During this stage I moved forward with making my paint more opaque and filling in all the holes in the canvas and the gaps of white. I learned how to blend better, and that was really fun to work with once I understood it and felt better about doing it. This stage was rather slow I was not focusing a lot on the painting at the time and I wish I was because I feel that it would have really benefitted me to do so.
Stage four:
In this stage I did a lot, I completed most of the right side of the painting and I got to a point where I felt really good about what I had done. I felt that at the end of this stage I got really good at having enough paint to fill up all the gaps in the canvas. I feel good about my skills in getting one color flush against another one, whereas before I did not feel as confident about that as I did in this stage. As seen in the picture, my lines look a lot cleaner than they did in earlier stages. I would say that I shied away from the left side of the piece because I was intimidated by some of the colors used and some of the technique like making really small lines or using kind of muddy colors. I got creative in the sense that I layered a lot of colors over top of each other both when they were wet and dry, I did this when I felt like my colors were not what I wanted them to be, they were too light or they didn't have enough purple for example.
Stage Five:
Stage five was me finishing the piece and trying to get it ready. I looked at what I had already done and tried to match the colors to the best of my abilities. First I separated some the sections to make them smaller and I used a lot of blending techniques and also some techniques that would leave the lines very clean against each other depending on the section. I could have spent some more time on this stage but my time was running out of time and I felt good enough about the other sections.
Experimentation:
In these images I was experimenting with adding white straight onto the canvas on top of another color if I needed to lighten it. Initially I liked the product but once I was further along in my process I wanted to make it cleaner. At first I thought the white would be too opaque to mix with the purple but once I did it I realized it worked well and I did it in some other small places that needed to be lightened. I did not also try this with other colors but maybe in my next painting I will try that. Although I thought what I did was good it was not matching with my final product so I painted on some more purple and that was too dark as well so I added white on top of that as well, and that time the white had retarder in it and that ended up much better in the end. In the end I like what I did and I will definitely use this in the future.
|
Although these images are not the final product, this is an example of how I went back over the original green that I painted here, seen in stage two and three. This is similar to the first experimentation example but different because I only went over the original colors that I did not find accurate or opaque enough. This showed me how to use different brush work, using a small flat wide brush which was really helpful for me.
|
This is an example of me going off of my original lines that I sketched, when I was looking back at the picture I realized that it was not accurate so I painted where it should be, then later on I did the same thing later on, mostly on the left side of the piece, where I started my sketch, which could be why there were some inaccuracies.
|
Reflection:
I feel as though I gained the skills to separate the work I was doing into stages, as well as reflecting on the work I did accurately and without being too critical of what I worked on. I definitely refined my skills on how to mix colors, I feel a change in how I was mixing colors last year to how I 'm mixing colors now. My overall development as an artist came from feeling better at assessing my process and how much time it's going to take me to finish the piece. But mostly importantly I feel that I have gotten better at mixing colors that are accurate to the piece I'm making although buying paint colors that are closer is very helpful in that process, but I would consider assessing your reference and seeing which colors are needed is a skill as well. I would say that one of the biggest challenges was my time management skills, that could have been better, I did not budget my time well enough, and I felt like I had too much to do nearing the due date, when I could've used my time more effectively. Another challenge I faced was working with line and making them thick and straight and that would go hand in hand with how the shapes in the piece were sometimes hard to identify. I have done painting in the past and I know that I'm better at blending and making the colors smooth than I had been previously. Compared to what I was making over the summer I have gotten better at making the gaps in the canvas less frequent with the development of my skills to layer paint and go over certain areas more than once. My absolute favorite part was getting to use the bright and vibrant colors that I had not really worked with yet, it made me more excited to work on the painting because I loved the colors I was using. My least favorite part was trying to assess the colors are proportions I should have from such a small picture, I tried to use my phone to zoom in and look at it that was but it made things to blurry and distorted, so it seemed like there wasn't a solution which was frustrating. I would hope that others view my work from the perspective of someone who watched how much time I put into the painting.