ASS4 - Project 5 Working from Drawings and Photographs

Exercise  - Painting from a Working Drawing

    For this exercise I have to find an area I know, such as within my home and make three drawings: 

A Linear Study

A Tonal Study

A Colour Study

From these three drawings paint what you have learned from that to see how well you capture the area.

Sketching

    This is a part of my new jungle theme living room. This area is one of my favourite parts with the palm tree between two chairs. I only want to show in my painting one chair and the brown table area so the furthest chair I am going to miss out and put a corner wall there to finish of my area better. I will now attempt the three drawings and report back here.

     I have now drawn the area and I think my three drawing represent the area well. I feel I have enough detail here to be able to go away and paint the scene. 

     I have pinned them on to my notice board in my art room and I am going to begin painting.

Painting

     As you can see above I have added my first part of my painting which is the back wall. I have also added shadow from the palm tree, which will be in front of it in my next layer. I came to realise after looking at a familiar area and drawing it three times, it was easy to quick sketch it out on my canvas as I was use to looking at the area and using my memory also to make sure I can get the area as how I interpret it.

    After a few more attempts I finished the painting, For the second layer I painted in the basic shapes of the objects such as the chair and table and the palm tree. For my 3rd layer I added the detail on top of each object. I feel like this came out well. I think my table and palm tree came out well but I thing I should have spent more time on painting the pattern on the chair as it look a little flat.

Overall

    Overall for this painting, I felt that my sketches helped me capture the area well. There was enough information there to use to create the scene in a painting. Perhaps I could of looked at doing some paint tests in my sketch book to practice, capturing the correct textures as I didn't do the pattern correctly on the chair. 

   I do think that being away from the area I was painting, helped me used my memory to interpret the area into a painting of how I see it. When we live in an area and see day to day items our memory just quickly captures it and does not always capture all the details. When it comes to painting that area, it is not as detailed as the real thing but it is an artists own interpretation of that area through there own eyes and memory. With the help of pre sketching, looking at tones and colours, it helps to give the artist more information on the area chosen to create more of a reliable painting of that area.

  In my opinion, I enjoyed painting this area. I think I have captured it well and have the correct proportions. The only critique thing is the texture of the chair and its pattern. I had totally forgotten what it looked like. I feel to overcome this next time is to test some textures in my sketchbook first, with paint to capture it as good as I can.  I think painting this way is fun to do and you can be more expressive, but I feel that if you want to capture its true form, you need to be looking at the area and have it in front of you to capture the smaller details better. 

Exercise - Squaring Up

In this exercise I have to use a grid on a drawing to show how to enlarge a drawing to create a bigger painting. I was in Chester the other week and took this photo of two cottage houses. 

Sketching

I have decided to just concentrated on the yellow cottage and have cropped the image. 

I am now going to sketch it out and add some colour using watercolours.

As you can see above I have finished my quick sketch. I have now put a grid on it and will attempt to put this on canvas.

     This is my grid on the canvas, I made sure I had the right shaped canvas to apply it to, so my drawing will become bigger but with the same proportions. I am now ready to paint.

Painting

   I have now finished for the night and I have got some of the basic shapes in and painted some of the bottom layers. I will have to wait for the black to dry a bit before adding the next part.

    I have now done another layer and added brick texture to the cottage and started on the window and door. I have also started on my wall climbing bush area. I am happy with this area so far. I like the shadow I have added from the bush on to the cottage it gives a good depth effect. I will continue this tomorrow.

    I have now done some more basic layers and shall wait a while for it to dry a bit. I have noticed today from the photo to my sketch and painting that I have made an error. The plants in pots are too far away from the wall of the cottage, then in the photo. I didn't square up correctly here. I am not too sure how I did this. I am going to continue with it anyway, with what I have done and comment later on. 

    I have finally finished my painting and I am pleased with it. The colours work well together. I used a lot of the yellow throughout this painting, even mixing it with greens and blues. It has that Naive feel to it and I have used my building up layers technique to show my own style. The depth looks well on the climbing bush and I do like the shadows on the house to give it a stand out effect. 

Overall

    I feel that this painting has been a learning curve, which I am going to try and improve on in my next painting using the grid better. I did make a mistake that the plants were not in there right spot. I did carry on with this error and It still looks good. If viewers looked at it I think they would not question it, unless they compared it to the place/photograph. I will attempt to get more of an accurate drawing/painting in the next assignment. 

Exercise - Working Form A Photo

I have had a look at some photos and have chosen this lovely sunset scene with two Polar bears.

    I think this is a relaxing photo and will be interesting to paint. I want to interpret it to show polar bears in there natural world and showing them enjoying the last bit of the evening sunlight. This images when I look at it gives me a sense of warms with the sunset and the fur of the polar bears even though they are sitting on snow. I am going to make my painting look warm with the rich sunset but also add hints of blue to the bears fur to show the coldness. I think adding more texture and more detail to the fur, will help them become good features in my painting. Firstly I am going to put a grid on the photo to mark it up and then do a sketch in watercolour in my sketch book

Sketching

    After putting a grid on the photo, I decided to do a quick practice in my sketch book using oil pastels. The oil pastels were good to create the sunset but were not ideal for wanting to add texture. The best way I could was to use my nails to scratch at the surface. It didn't come out very well in my opinion, but I am hoping my painting will come out a lot better using oil paints.

Painting

I have now got my board and put the grid on to it. I was starting an old painting on here but will paint over it and use the board in the exercise.

      By looking at the photo, I need to see what I need to paint first. I feel I need to start with the sun set as you can see around the bears fur that there is highlights of the sun. I will do this as a base layer and work on top of it. 

  

  As you can see this is what I have done tonight. I have done the sunset and I have started to add the bears in. I really like the sunset effect in the background and I feel I have merged the colours together well. 

    I will have to stop to wait for it to dry a little as the orange is smearing in to my polar bears fur, making it change the colour I want to use. I shall reattempt again in a few days. 

     Its been 3 days since I last reported and today I began to paint again. I had so much fun with it that I finished it and forgot to take some more step photos. For me my photograph above of my painting does not do it justice. I am really excited about how this has turned out and I think it is one of my favourite paintings I have done.

     I like how I have captured the warmness of the suns last light and how it is shining on the bears fur. I used the blue, like I said I was going to as it worked out wonderfully. The blue adds texture to my bears and gives good detail, that fits in with the sunlight. The glow around the bears has worked out well, showing there silhouettes in the sunset. The ground with the snow I have created, gives that gentle texture with lots of humps and bumps. I added light areas on the snow too, to show the light. 

Overall

     I feel I have created a good painting, with a good effect of the sunset. I have achieved blowing up the photograph, using the grid and painting in my own style to show what I grasped from the scene.
    I feel my paintings is different from the photograph as I have added more light and textures. I wanted to express more of the warmth in my painting. I chose to paint my scene in this way, as I was attracted to the sunset in the photograph. It influenced me to express my love of sunsets and wildlife. I found it to be a good exercise to paint from a photograph as you can grasp what is there. I do think though you can tell from my painting that I painted it from an photo and not from being there. I think painting from photos can make your painting look flat if not enough research is done first. Perhaps observing a real sunset and A real polar bear would of helped improve the depth of the scene? I do however really like my painting and I cannot fault it apart from the depth, It may look a little flat. I do think this is one of my better paintings as my techniques of blending are now working well.