What a Long Strange Trip it has Been Pt. 3 (maybe longer)I Way back in the beginning of the year I was asked what my philosphy of art was. I said that it might change so ask me later. Well its later and I dont think my philosphy of art changed much, but rather it has been expanded. I think of art as what the creator makes that makes them happy as well as tell a story of memory they have. However you interpret what art it is, it all boils down to something you create.
This year has been the craziest year of high school ever. I knew that when second semester rolled around I was going to be scrambling to get my pieces done, but I never expected that it would be so crazy that I had to start and finish a piece the night before the portfolio is due. With that being said I still enjoyed the class and even though at times I thought I was gonna die I knew it was worth the stress. Looking back at all my work I can see some improvement and the development of my style. I may not want to ever paint fruit again and jars but I am still happy with the concentration I choose and I think its very unique. Its safe to say that I have grown as an artisit over the course of the year, but I have also grown as a person thanks to all the people in my class and especially because of Mrs. Rossi. Going into art 4 last semester I saw everyone in the class and I knew of just about everyone and was even friends with most way back in the day or we were friends that never talked. I feel so lucky that I have had a school year to get and know everyone in my class, they are some of the coolest, funniest, and most talented people I have ever met. I am going to really miss everyone as well all continue on the next part of our lives. To any of you guys that read this: I hope you have an amazing time in college (or gap year) and that your life is always exciting. I'M GOING TO MISS YALL SO MUCH! <3. Mrs. Rossi, where do I even start, you have taught me so much artistic wise and even life skills. You taught me how to me confident as an artist and even in other aspects of my life. You have taught me to go with the flow if you can, but its ok to make some rules/plans and stick to them. I cannot thank you enough for everything !
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Concentration #12THIS PIECE WAS NOT GOOD!! I somehow managed to start and finish the piece all in one day! To help with the detail I used prismacolor pencils on a smaller size than I normally do, 8x8. ReflectionOk, so there is a lot of good and bad with this piece. Good: I like the color choices, the composition, and the sliced peaches themselves. Bad: the flatness of the piece, the stupid pressure cooker in the background, and how I rushed the piece. In some places its really lacking depth and the jars are missing the 3D effect. The lids of the jar are great, but the sliver of the background makes them blend into the background. Its not terrible but its not fantastic. Thats about all I have to say about this piece :/
Concentration #7 - "Funneling the Strawberry Jam"As mentioned in an earlier post, Its been a hot min since I did this piece, so this will mostly be reflection. ReflectionI'm not sure what it is about this piece but I really like it, I know its not my best work I have done but I still really like it. Since I was pressed for time but I wanted to have a few more detailed pieces so I painted it in acrylic. Maybe its the color choice or the perspective or that its my style, but it still looks different than all of my other concentration pieces. I knew the perspective was going to be challenging so I grided out the canvas to keep the perspective somewhat together. I think it turned out pretty well but I could have pushed the shadows a bit more all over the piece.
Concentration #10 - "Taking a Layer Off"So its been a pretty long time since I created this piece. Thank you Peakfest, AP Art portfolio due, and AP Art show keeping me behind on my digital portfolio posts. What I'm trying to say is I don't remember much about each piece so these last few blogs are going to be mostly reflections on the piece. ReflectionWith this piece I wanted to create a soft, delicate feel because I think the process that my dad uses to peel peaches is rather delicate. First he scores the peaches with a cross, then he boils the peaches to get the skin extra soft. After that he shocks them in a bowl of ice water for a min. and then they are ready to peel. My dad does this method because it allows him to use his hands to peel the peaches and the peel comes off all in one piece making it much faster and easier. To recreate this feeling I choose to do the piece in watercolor. I really like how the peaches turned out in this piece. It was hard to create a value change in the peach that separated the flesh of the peach from the skin that was peeling off. I like the way the bowl turned out too with the way I painted the blue over the peaches to push them back into the bowl and surrounded by water. I think the composition of the piece with the coffee maker in the back was a good idea, although I wish there wasn't that noticeable water ring in the black that made it stand out so much.
Concentration #8 "Jam "n" Biscuts (11x14)I don't have much to say about this piece, I live in the south, I like biscuts with strawberry jam and butter. I wanted this piece to be similar in the fact that it included a jar of the food I was canning so the last picture in all the series will be similar to make the concentration more cohesive. I also wanted to mix up the angles of the pieces too since, I thought just painting flat/ straight countertops would be super boring. ReflectionIm not really sure where my other progress pictures went, I know I took them, but I cant find the files anywhere. I really like the way the objects of the piece, the countertop, well its like all the other pieces so I find it boring now. In the actual picture the biscuts aren't as orange and brown, but really yellow. I thought it would be better to darken up the color of the biscuts since the jam was going to be dark. I didn't' want it to stick out that much. I really wanted to add as much texture to the food as I could especially since I was using oil paint so it could be relatively easy to do that. I think I acheived the texture I wanted in the biscuts, but not so much in the strawberry and the jam. I mixed like every color I had on one half of my palette for the edge of the counter top and I really like the way it turned out. I really stuggled with the counter top and its shadows since in the reference photo there was a papertowel under the biscuts, thus eliminating the shadows. If I would go back and fix anything it would be the shadows on the countertop.
Concentration #6 - Sliced & Cored Strawberries (7.5x9)Ok, so I wrote a freak ton about all the memories associated with this pieces and an amazing paragraph discussing the composition of the piece and for some reason weebly decided to delete it all :( Take 2: I had mentioned that I had memories of my family and our family friends going strawberry picking and I can remember my sister and I running through the strawberry patch trying to see who could pick the "perfect" strawberry. Even though the steps of piece one and two are very close in the strawberry series, they have strong memories with them and that is why I wanted to draw/paint them. For the slicing of strawberries, I can remember one time where my sister told my dad that she saw this "life hack" for coring strawberries with a straw and that it was faster and easier than a knife. Of course my Dad didn't believe her, and I said that the kitchen gadget we had for coring strawberries was better than both the knife and the straw. My Mom quickly got tired of all of our arguing and her solution was to suggest a contest to prove which one was truly the best. We all got 10 strawberries to core, and whoever finished first won. I remember having so much fun and laughing a ton since my Dad kept eating his strawberries so he had less to core. I don't remember who won, but I know I just use a knife to core strawberries now. Moving on from the memories and to the actual piece. I wanted to illustrat all of the steps that you do when coring the strawberries. First you remove the leaves/top depending on the strawberry, then you core it, and then if the strawberry is big you slice it. To keep the piece cohesive with the other concentration pieces I kept it on the teal-ish kitchen counter and even added the same two cutting boards that I had painted in the cooked peaches painting. I think the composition I picked is interesting and highlights each step of slicing strawberries. ReflectionI HATED DOING THIS PIECE, I don't hate the final piece, but I really didn't like doing the piece. I think it was because I had issues drawing the piece due to all of the perspective, and that I wasn't getting the color I wanted for the strawberries. I think the composition was good and I liked the way I did the clear plastic container, I just didn't enjoy the process. I like the way the berries stacked on each other and the cutting board in the background. If I could do the piece again I would add deeper and redder values to the strawberries and add more detail in general to the leaves.
Concentration #9 - Basket of Peaches (11x14)The last fruit that I decided to put in my concentration was peaches. I was going to do green beans but I wanted to keep the color scheme for all the fruits together to make the concentration more cohesive. Peaches is one of my favorite fruits to eat in the summer so it's always nice when we have a few jars of sliced peaches in our pantry that I can eat. There are many memories attached to peaches and most of them with my family, I even lost my first tooth eating a peach. I didn't have a picture of these peaches taken before I had this idea so I had to go and get peaches so I could take a reference photo. The only problem is peaches aren't in season when I needed to take this picture. Keeping that in mind I didn't buy many peaches because I didn't want them to go to waste. Unfortunately, when I put the peaches in the basket, I noticed I didn't have enough to fill the basket the way I wanted. I ended up adding apples and potatoes to raise the peaches up so I could arrange them the way I wanted in the basket. After doing that annoying acrylic piece I was so excited to go back to oil painting. I think the style I have when painting with oils will help create the depth/shadows of the peaches sitting in the basket. ReflectionOh man, I didn't realize how much I missed oil painting. I loved painting the peaches so much, I really liked the colors I used for the peaches (I didn't even use any orange paint!). Even with the orange wash underneath I thought the peaches stood out. After painting the peaches I added a thin layer of brown/purple-white paint to where the basket is. I did this since the wash was a bit on the darker side and I had trouble getting the shade of brown I wanted for the basket. For the background I wanted to make sure the piece still matched the rest of my concentration since it wasn't sitting on the kitchen counter like all my other pieces. To keep the piece cohesive I painted the background the tealish color with swirls to give some movement to the piece as well. When it came to the basket I really struggled. I'm not sure what it is, but I always seem to struggle with browns (especially when it comes to painting). At first the brown was too light and all the woven pieces blended into each other and you could barely tell they were woven. I asked Mrs. Rossi for some suggestions and she told me to go darker than I thought it should be and stick to straight up vandyke brown and burnt sienna and then add a few highlights after the paint is dry. I think that going really dark helped the piece come together. I love the colors and composition of the piece, but if I had to change something it would be the basket, I would try to add more detail into the basket.
Concentration #11 (11x14) - Cooked PeachesIt is werid to do these pieces out of order when I am trying to explain the process of why I choose the 4 steps to canning for each series. This is piece 3 out of 4 for the peaches series and its hard to explain how I got there when I haven't even done the other two pieces that come before it in the series. My dad tends to jar sliced peaches and peach jam, so I decided to highlight a part from each process. For the sliced peaches I am going to do the part where my dad boils the peaches and peels the skin of them, and for the jam I am painting when the peaches are getting cooked into the jam so they can be canned. When looking at my reference pictures I decided I like the bowl of peaches from one and the pot with the cooked peaches in the other. I did a couple of sketches to get an idea of how the composition would look before I went to paint it. Since I am behind in pieces I decided to paint this one in acrylic.....That was a BIG mistake ( I really don't like acrylic) ReflectionOverall I think the piece turned out ok, but I really didn' t like using acrylic paint so it makes it harder for me to like this piece. I think the porportions might be a bit off since I compiled tew different pictures together so it leaves room for the composition to get distorted. With that said I really like the colors of the piece I tried to simplify the colors so it wasn't overwhelming and keep the hues similar so nothing stood out too much. My favorite part of the piece is the sliced up peaches in the bowl, I love the colors and textures so much.
Concentration #5 - Strawberry Picking (8x10)With my concentration, I wanted to tell the "story" of the art of canning through 3 series of 4 pieces while highlighting important parts of the canning process of each fruit. With this being piece number 5 it would make sense that I am moving on from apples (me not drawing apples?!, crazy right.) The next fruit I decided to draw was strawberries, they also happened to be the second thing my dad ever caned (apples being the first). I didn't want all of my pieces for each series to look the same so I had a rough time coming up with the composition for this piece. I wanted to do a basket of strawberries, but I had done a bucket of apples for the other series. After quite a few more sketches I had settled on drawing the strawberries in a bucket that was sitting in between strawberry plants in a picking patch. I didn't have one solid reference so I pieced together a couple of photos to make the composition I wanted. ReflectionI really like how the piece turned out, but there was a major struggle to get there. I had planned on laying down the first few layers of colors with pan watercolors and then taking the watercolor pencils to add texture. Which the plan was going all fine and dandy till I decided to use masking fluid so I could paint the background. The point of masking fluid is to cover areas of the paper that you don't want to get wet or paint on so that you can be looser when painting. I decided to put masking fluid on top of all of the strawberries and the plants so I make a more cohesive background. Little did I know that masking fluid and watercolor pencil don't go together. If you look through the progress pictures that after I did the background the plants and berries look way lighter than they were before. I had to go in and redo all the watercolor pencil texture. I really like the texture of the piece, I wish that I had some more reds so I could add more values to the strawberries.
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2018
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