I finally did it! I made it through the first part of the program!
Yew! Doing the painting for this week took such a long time, it’s actually taken me about two and a half weeks to do this painting- mostly because of poor planning and I guess trying to work in a way that I don’t normally work.
Normally, I create an abstract background and then simply draw the portrait over the background choosing what to discard and what to keep in the moment and also choosing how much or how little to render the figure. But this time I created a source digitally that brought together 3 different images and attempted to just literally paint the source and copy it exactly.
Part of the problem was that I don’t think I created the source very well. I don’t think it had enough light and dark and I could have modified the imagery a bit better to exaggerate the different angles at which the face is reflected in the mirror while also ensuring that important parts of the face such as the eyes aren’t broken up in awkward ways.
The second thing was that I did a double exposure with the face of a woman and a graffiti wall, but I could have cleaned that double exposure up a bit so it didn’t intersect the face weirdly.
All in all I had to take a lot of liberties with this painting and just focus on one aspect of it at a time.
But because I was so conflicted about how to construct it I wasted a lot of time doing work that I LATER HAD TO PAINT OVER and also because I had to paint over it so many times a lost most of the collage elements I had put in the underlay.
All in all, I’m happy with how it turned out. I really love the colours of the face. I think this magenta, blue and peach colour scheme is really nice and the way I was able to exaggerate the texture with dry brushing and palette knife techniques is really nice. I think I’ll let it sit overnight and when I come back tomorrow I’ll like it even more, I’m a bit close to it at the moment.
Also this week on the drawing front, we did an abstract landscape- I worked from a source but instead of aiming for accuracy we just aimed to create a general impression of a landscape.
The second drawing exercise was to do an abstract for about 20 minutes and then see what images your imagination can see in it and then push that and actually render that in.
In my abstract to could see pac-man chasing raindrops?
And the third exercise was to draw a tree from imagination using water soluble graphite. At least I think that’s what it was. John taught the lesson and he put in a lot of cool doodles and his turned out really well, I think for his exercise I couldn’t get a feel for it. I kinda struggled with all these exercises this week, I’m not sure I why I wasn’t able to get into my right brain.
But now I’m ready for the next part Mixed Media and Voice! All the lessons in the last section were really prescriptive and clear so I’m not sure what to expect with this next section.
