Advanced Painting Series Part 1

In my love for painting pets, I decided to do a series of more exotic animals for my Advanced Painting Series. Here I will be experimenting with texture, color, and drips/washes with oil colors. The first piece I started working on is from a photo I took of a white tiger. I think it was a good choice in terms of texture and value. It had more blacks and whites which was a great way to get me back into using oil paints, and had all the beautiful fur I got to paint. I want to go back into it and add some more leaves and details in those leaves, but for the most part it is complete.

In the process of creating the underpainting for this piece, I really loved how the drips of greens, blacks, and some yellows ran down the canvas. When I left it and kept painting, I felt like it was something that really gave a strong contrast between that and the realistic tiger. I plan to continue using those drips for the rest of the series.

The painting became a series of layers. White after black, after white. I just continued using layers to make the fur have more depth and value. I started with a larger brush and then just got smaller and smaller in size to get to those super fine details.

In the end I am very pleased with how it looks. I think after adding just a couple more details it will really be the way I had envisioned. Going back to oils was a great way for me to work more on my realistic artwork which I have definitely come to include in art as a whole.

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Construction Foam Monumental Sculpture

This project was all about creating an everyday object out of construction foam to a larger (monumental) scale. My first idea was to create a huge gummy bear or maybe a locket. I really couldn’t make a commitment to any of my ideas until I started thinking about things I like to do and objects that I use to do those things. I love playing video games! At the time I was into this old school kick and played a lot of my games on the GameCube. So, I decided to create a controller for that system. Half way through I felt very overwhelmed. It ended up being a lot harder than I had imagined… not really a simple object. However I continued working and ended up being pretty happy with the end result.

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After all of the measuring, cutting, and comparing sizes of things I glued it all together. When dried I used a white primer, and then added the corresponding colors to try and match the real controller as much as possible. Again I was pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.

Data Collection Inspired Piece

The following piece is an interpretation of data I had collected for a week. The data was based on how many times I had talked about or interacted with my pets in anyway. This number came to be a whopping 351 times! This included any time I had brought them up in conversation, posted pictures about them, took care of them/interacted with them, and even any sketched or drawings done of them.

As my pets and animals in general have more recently peaked my interest with painting, I had decided to do a separate smaller painting of each one. I went with full acrylic as I wanted to play around with a realistic look that had a sort of simplistic organization in the final presentation of the piece. The data is represented in each of the smaller canvases through the dots shown on them. I typically spend a lot of my time equally with each pet of mine so I took the 351 times from my data and divided it by 8. This gave me approximately 44. Each canvas has 44 dots with corresponding colors to the backgrounds of the pictures I had initially taken. There is one canvas, however, that does not have any dots at all. This pet was adopted after the week of collecting data. Therefore he was not accounted for in the 351.

I was very pleased with the final product of this piece as I had a fun time painting each of my pets. I was first unsure of leaving the background of the canvases completely white as I thought it may leave the piece looking unfinished. I came to the conclusion when completing it that it gave more meaning to the data aspect of this piece. It shows that the background isn’t just a bunch of random dots, but have some sort of meaning even if the viewer is unaware of what that is. I wanted to make them look almost as if they were photos taken on a photo strip. Mostly because a lot of my interaction with my pets is taking pictures of them doing different things and in different position and places. I think leaving this white background with a framed solid black achieved that more and I was very happy with it in the end.

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