I think it's safe to say that this is the most stressful painting I have ever done in my entire life. After missing four days of school because of being sick I started this project super late, and I had zero clue what I was doing. I had like 4 different ideas, none of which were particularly appealing to me. I found a picture of an old beach house my family and I had stayed in a few years ago, and I thought it was really cool so i figured, why not paint it? It started out okay, I was digging the look of the chairs and I had an idea of what I was doing. Then came the background. I changed the color of the wood in the background so many times (as you can see in my in progress pictures) and NONE of the times I was satisfied with the way it looked. I eventually decided I needed to stop overthinking this painting and just get it done so I could move on. After that I started to hate the painting a little bit less, and I started to see it coming together more. For the most part I'm okay with the way it turned out, but this is definitely not my best work.
The first thing that I think made this process so difficult for me was that I used acrylic paint. As someone who loves to blend, blend, blend, acrylics were a rude awakening for me after using oils. It was like after a few seconds, boom, the paint was dry. It was infuriating. I tried using acrylic retarder, which helped a little, but the drybrush look was unavoidable. I eventually gave up on trying to have a super neat, realistic looking piece, and sort of went for a more abstract, painter-y style. It doesn't feel so much like my work, but I just felt so rushed that I didn't feel like I had another option. There are so many things I would change if I could redo this painting, but I'll name only the main ones. First, I'd use a bigger canvas. 11" by 14" turned out to be way too small in my opinion, but once I had started I didn't want to redo it. I think that if I'd used a larger canvas I might have felt more freedom in my movements and been able to capture more detail, but maybe part of that was my lack of time as well. I might still go back in and add more colors to the wood of the porch, as I feel its still quite boring, but we'll save that for another time. Even though this is not a piece I'm particularly fond of, I still really like the way the chairs in the foreground turned out. I started with those, so I think I was much calmer, and it shows in the way they look. I also like the water in the background, and how abstract I made it, even though you can still tell it's the ocean. I wish I had more positive things to say about this piece, but I know I can definitely learn from this process, which is important. I think my major takeaway from this project is that I am my own worst enemy when it comes to my art. I tend to overthink my pieces when I get stressed, and in the future I need to learn to just take a step back and calm down. Overall, I like this piece and the beachy vibe it gets across, but there is definitely more room for improvement. It's safe to say, however, that I won't be doing another acrylic painting for a while.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
A Little InfoThis page is all of my art from Art Four, which I took my junior year of high school. The main goal of this class was to begin collecting pieces that I can potentially add to my AP Portfolio at the end of Senior year. During this class I created some of my favorite pieces, and also one of my least favorite (I'm looking at you, adirondack chair painting). I'll be retaking this class in the fall of senior year to add more pieces to learn and grow even more, and create more potential portfolio pieces. Archives
January 2017
Categories |