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.
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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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May 2018
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