Visual Expression: Painting Wednesday #2

Visual Expression: Painting Wednesday #2

The second week of painting was mostly spent on making canvases for oils and acrylics. In other words, the day comprised  mostly of banging stretcher bars with a hammer, ripping through canvas, cursing the uncooperative nail guns and sore hands.

As if that wasn’t enough, our second assignment was to try out watercolour painting with the classroom palettes. Wouldn’t have ever believed the scariest words in the last sentence could turn out to be “the classroom palette”.

I’m not sure if you English speakers out there know what I mean. Out here the classroom palette consists of six or nine basic colours (the six are yellow, red and blue each in warm and cold tone and in the nine the extras usually are green, white and black though it varies) which may or may not give out some colour. The classroom palette is the bane of every kid’s existence and ruins every potentially remarkable watercolour artist faster than you can say “the previous dork didn’t wash these”.

Being the supercilious git I am, I thought that since I can survive easily with three colours in my oil painting, how hard can it be. Famous last words as you might know. I seriously overestimated my skills.

Luckily after a slight adjustment period I got hang of it. As you can see from my flower painting, I missed reds quite badly. Partly because of it I got a tad bored (see the purple corner) but despite that, I think it turned out to be an ok experiment seeing that the aim of this was just to have some feel of how watercolours and the materials work in view of our main assignments.

(Sorry for the abysmally bad picture. In real life the top right corner is green etc.)

My idea behind this work was just to try out the range of the basic techniques I could think of in the spot. I think you can clearly see that I am truly lazy. The shapes are really off and don’t even mention the so-called arrangement: didn’t really plan anything, didn’t have ref pictures, didn’t bother to draw anything. Just went with the flow, mainly using negative painting. Don’t even start to wonder what kind of flowers those are. I have no clue. My horticulturist mother must be so proud, not to mention my botanics teacher… (I think they might be some sort of double peony – rose – oriental poppy hybrid.)
And I should think that no art teacher would hold their breath.

Beside that one I did two smaller paintings. The flower thing was something like A4-A3 and these two are roughly the size of postcards.

Both are of my regular lazy-ass variety but let’s not hold that against them. I’m really proud of one little thing: I painted these real quick. Maybe about 3 minutes per piece (+ drying times, of course). In real life these are pretty nice, especially the bluer one.

So, these were my test pieces. As a summary I would like to say:

  1. I looooooooooooooooooooooooooove large watercolour brushes.
  2. I need aforementioned tool. Despite being skint and extremely tight.
  3. I have totally and utterly forgot everything when it comes to the classroom palette.
  4. I seriously need to learn how to photograph my stuff with my mobile. That or start to carry a proper camera with me. I’m deeply sorry about the lack of quality and sharpness of the photos.

(WW-posting is and will be a no-show because I haven’t got anything done.)

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