-The idea was a simple painting, I knew that if I tried something too had I would just end up with a bunch of paint on a canvas instead of a painting. I looked up landscapes on Google and saw a desert and I thought I could do that and people would be able to tell what it was. I used the basic paint Ms.Garrity gave us day 1, I attempted to mix the brown and white for a lighter brown, but it just made a mess and gave me a slightly lighter brown which you can see on the left side of the painting. I tried to make shadows but I think they would've looked better if the black was slightly lighter. I just thought the desert landscape I took inspiration from looked cool, I wanted to add the gas station I originally saw in the landscape but I didn't have much room to work with. Mixing the right paint color I wanted was harder then I thought, but I think the hardest part was planning on how to do what I wanted to do step by step. If I could go back time and try again I think I could make it look way smoother if I planned out how I wanted to do it better. A first attempt at realism I suppose, It's unique to me because I made it. I like the color of the sky, with splotches of dark and lightish blue.
I knew I wanted to paint one of my pets when I signed up for painting. I just didn't know which picture of my dog I wanted to paint. I scrolled through my camera roll and found a nice picture of my dog standing on the couch and putting his front paws on my stomach. I first painted the background Yellow, then I drew with pencil where I wanted to split between the couch and the window above. Then I outlined my dog and proceeded to paint him, mixing a few colors together in an attempt to get his color right. Then I outlined his collar to make sure I could differentiate the two. I just wanted the audience to see how handsome my dog was. The most difficult part was blending a color that was close to my dogs fur color, my dogs fur is gray in normal light but looks brownish in a few different lighting. Ms. Garrity gave me a few pointers on how to get a color close to his fur and I added from there. I tried to make it as realistic a drawing as I could, the little mistakes and weird brush strokes you can see in the painting makes it unique to me. I love the way my dog's face came out.
Zach Lyness "Ocean Sunset"
I needed to do a landscape painting and I knew I either wanted to do a mountain range or a sunset/sunrise on the ocean. So I chose a nice sunset that I thought would be a bit challenging for my current skill. I started with a tannish yellow as the first color on the whole canvas. Then I transferred the clouds using a transferring sheet and started in on the water on the bottom of the canvas, the water was reflecting a lot of different colors in the original picture so I used a few different colors and tried to have them lay so that you can see all the individual colors but they started to look a bit brown so I stopped before it looked like soup. I don't know if it has much of a meaning, I want the audience to at least think that this looks like a sunset on the ocean instead of a mess. I found the water to be difficult, with the reflection of multiple colors along with waves, I tried my best to put seperate color strokes in without making a mess and I think I stopped right before it became a mess. If I could start over I'd let the paint I just used dry before putting a new color over it. Realistic, I think it's unique to me because of how I went about the steps of completing the painting. I love the way the dark clouds are a similar color to the middle of the water beneath it, but not quite there, just like the reference photo.