Watercolors!!!

Hooray! No more acrylics! (although, as usual, we switched mediums just as I started feeling like I was getting the hang of the previous one...)

We started with an exercise where we crumpled up paper, pinned it to the wall, and then used it as a still life of sorts. I liked finding color in the supposedly white piece of paper against a white wall. Then we did some little observational paintings from the landscape. We were supposed to pick specific things and paint them (without context or anything) so some of them ended up looking a little abstract anyway. Then we did some still life paintings and then we duplicated some photos from magazines. I like watercolors. Granted they can be very difficult to manage (they just like doing their own thing), but I think they are fun.

(PS: My scanner does NOT like watercolors. So, these are a lot better in real life I promise!)

Featuring: The Mountainside, and Some Plants

Featuring: A Branch, Leaves in a Puddle, and Pile of Stones (that sounds like it could be a band name)

...yeah... I really can't stop drawing figures. I think it's pretty easy to see where my interests lie! (This is a girl in my class who was painting landscapes. Like we were supposed to be doing. And no, she didn't know I was painting her... until we had to display our work for the whole class to see... haha)

For this one I decided to paint the same still life a second time using a more stylized approach with harder lines and more separate color blocks.

These next three are the magazine photos.

An ocean landscape...

Tomatoes! :)

Which of course make me think of this :)

Acrylic Still Life Unit

When my teacher announced that we were going to start doing still life paintings again I was super relieved and excited. I think of myself as a normally very representational artist. As much as I loved the abstract oils and trying things outside of my comfort zone... I was ready to get back in my comfort zone.

At first I was still using the house paints but that quickly became a much bigger problem than it had been with the abstract stuff. It is a little hard to color-match when you only have those few, very bright colors. So I tried a couple things before having to get my own acrylics. They were a very cheap little box set (like the kind you get your budding-artist kids) but they were much better than the others had been.

With this one I put down a base layer of acrylics (the house paints) and then put oils over the top of it. It really just turned into an oil painting as you can't really even tell there were acrylics there before. So I think that was cheating, but... oh well!

This one was strictly acrylics and that's it! Somehow I managed to make it look pretty close to the still life (even though the colors were a bit off).

I was getting super frustrated with this one. This is where I started using my own acrylics. But, as they were cheap, they were also small so I was trying to use them very frugally so they wouldn't run out. But it is difficult to cover a piece of paper in acrylics without using a lot of them (they dry so quickly!). So...

...I started making paintings a fourth that size! These next three paintings are 5 1/2" x 5". They are my favorites of this whole set. Hopefully for the final my teacher still counts them as each being a whole painting!

Acrylic Abstract Unit

I have been really bad at updating this blog. Whoops! So now, at final's week, I am going to add all of the paintings I have done from the whole second half of this semester. Prepare to be overwhelmed by art!

This unit was with acrylic paints. *Note: I don't much care for acrylic paints.* But if the teacher tells you to use them, you use them. I was too broke (them oil paints cost a pretty penny) to go buy my own acrylic paints so all of these abstract paintings were done using some plain house paints in buckets that my teacher had. Hence the rather consistent color scheme of absurdly loud oranges, blues, reds, and yellows. But, I tried to make the best of it! I like some of them, but unlike with the oil abstract unit I never really found a "style" I liked and stuck to. So they are all pretty different. Some worked and some didn't but hey, it was good experimenting!

I was getting pretty tired of trying and feeling like I wasn't successful at abstract stuff so I defiantly threw some figures in it. Ha! But... they actually weren't very great either. My teacher and I discussed them and he said that even though the figures didn't really work for the pieces he still liked that I was trying new things. So, that's good.

Here I think my eyes were exhausted from all the bright colors and I realized that I had started making my paintings busier and busier in an attempt to make them look better. So I went the exact opposite route and tried a really minimalist style. (btw, look at the texturing at the top of this! "How did you do that?" you may ask. I'll tell you- paper towels. I just put some on the paper and painted over it. hahaha)

This one was a bit of an accident. I hadn't cleaned my palette from the oil paints (because I still wanted to use them) so I was palette-less. I improvised by taking a really thick, textured, bad-quality piece of paper I had and used it as a palette. Then at the end of it I just sort of mushed all the paints together on it. Then I cheated a little by putting oils over the top (the blue paint). So it's mixed media! Oooo!

This is where I had had enough of trying new things and I decided to just try my technique for my oil abstracts with the acrylics. So it looks a lot more like the paintings on the previous post than any of it's fellow acrylic paintings. (I also glazed it with the polyurethane that I used to make all my oil paintings so shiny and smooth)