Painting Final Exam
Required Question
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A project I felt that was challenging but successful was my landscape oil painting. When I decided to use a picture with a lot of texture in the leaves and trees I was not sure exactly how I would create the realistic look without blending into one color. I chose to paint this picture because of all the colors throughout the water and the different greens in the background. To create this look, I knew I had to add a lot of highlight and shadows on the trees, leaves, and water. For adding the textured look I took more paint on my brush and added small clumps of paint so there was a 3D effect along with stippling the brush onto the canvas. For the water I added shades of blue, purple, and a little green on the edges. To make my painting different than the picture, I decided to have the trees be brighter along with the water being more vibrant and adding more blue. With me making the trees surrounding the picture brighter and more vibrant, I feel that unlike the picture, the eyes are more drawn to them and the water doesn't take away from the trees as much in the painting. The rocks surrounding the water in the picture were more of a bland, grey color so for my painting I decided to make them a brighter color as well and use a tan color to look like sand/ land color. Another big obstacle I found was how to paint the mountain. To create the detailed color on the mountains, I decided to paint the full mountain white and then paint over spots with the blue. In some spots I placed blue paint when the white was mostly dry and other parts where the white was still a little wet for a lighter blue. The mountain in the picture also was smaller than what I decided to do for the painting because I felt there should be less room for the sky and the mountain to be a bigger focus. The final difficulty I had with this painting was trying for the lighter green trees and bushes to not blend into each other and look like one full bush. With me adding dark green to the edges and adding shadow, this helped separate them and look individual.
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4 Questions
3. I felt that my sunflower picture using watercolor was my least successful painting. I feel this way because of the use of watercolor which is hard to control. Watercolor can be very dark or light and if I were to add too much water the painting would become very patchy and really hard to fix. I had trouble with figuring out how much water to add to the watercolor paint without adding too much water or too much paint in one spot. One of the problems I faced in this project was part of my paper tearing from the amount of water I put on the paper. I wish for my choice of the painting for watercolor to be a different picture that was of a landscape instead of a flower. I think a sky would be more fun to paint and the light, bright colors of blue. The look that watercolor gives to water I think looks very pretty and smooth.
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5. The first mini lesson that I felt was beneficial was the watercolor technique one. Before the lesson, I didn't know there were so many different techniques. The technique using salt, I decided to use on the petals of my sunflower final watercolor piece which is one of the techniques I learned in this class and from the mini lesson. The watercolor mini lesson also helped me learn how to fade colors to create highlight and shadow. The second mini lesson I felt was beneficial was the color pencil drawing of the fruit. This helped me prepare for painting and showed all of the colors you might think you would not need to use. When coloring with the colored pencil, I added colors such as dark green and dark blue to create shadow which is what I did in painting as well. The colored pencil fruit drawing taught me for my landscape oil painting, instead of using the color black which is unnatural in nature, to use dark green and dark blue colors.
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7. My favorite medium to work with in this class was oil paint. At first, I was not big fan of oil paint because the colors could blend and get muddy easily. Before oil, we worked with acrylic that dried and didn't blend as easily. I didn't really enjoy using oil paint on the fruit still life project because I found painting fruit difficult when adding the details and shading. After using the oil paint on my final landscape painting, I enjoyed how the paint did not dry nearly as fast as acrylic so that later on I would be able to blend color on top or into other colors. I learned while working to place down your darker colors or darker shades and let dry or still be a little wet to add highlight and blend. With acrylic, for me it is harder to create soft shading or highlights because of how fast the paint dries. I found acrylic paint to be harsher than oil paint and for my paintings I prefer to fully blend.
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1. I believe my painting portfolio does accurately reflect my development in the class. My portfolio starts off with the drawings from the first day and the first big project being the flower watercolor. I feel that the watercolor painting was the worst one mainly because of the medium used. The newer posts with the acrylic and oil paint has more control and I feel are better projects. The oil paint landscape I believe is my best project and is as well one of the last projects. Before this class, I did not know how to use oil paint or watercolor. I only had experience with acrylic paint from art 1. Before this class, I did not enjoy drawing or painting animals because I thought of that as complex. My final project being of my guinea pig looks very close to the picture that was used as reference and ended up being one of my favorite art pieces.
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