Focus Study
Origami Painting
NZ artist Candi Dentice is an artist with conscience. In her oil paintings nature is tightly ordered and contained. She has a Magritte-like attention to detail and her work is symbolic and allegorical, but unlike Rene Magritte and the Surrealists her focus is on ecology, the plight and fate of the natural world; the view outside our window.
Origami is a recurring motif. Flocks of paper birds take wing and paper boats are set adrift. Dentice’s style is bittersweet, her paintings evoke fragility. In Dawn and Dusk shadows stretch across panoramic vistas of sea and sky. The mood in her illustrative landscapes is wistful. The folded birds and boats become totemic, traces of the human hand. The delicate art of origami is matched by Dentice. Her paintings render and record an artificial world populated by native trees and leaves. Her level of skill is so convincing that it can take time to comprehend that her landscapes are fictitious; false.
Each painting is informed by close preparatory study. Dentice draws from nature. Semi-transparent glazes are applied to the finished surface of her works. Her small paintings are lovely and luminous, but her compositions are also choreographed to unsettle. In Choices a fleet of gigantic paper fortunetellers intercepts a group of trees. The connection is immediate; the fortunetellers function like koans raising questions; generating doubts. The climate in Dentice’s paintings is indeterminate. An atmosphere of jeopardy persists. Nature is ordered, pruned and preserved. Dentice uses repetition and pattern to critique cloning and overdevelopment. Her work bristles with a sense of preciousness
Colour Scheme
you will be using a TRIADIC colour scheme to paint your origami work. refer to your paint experiments to select your favourite TERTIARY colour and then make a triadic scheme with the other two colours spaced equally around the colour wheel.
You can use tints and shades of those three colours
SOURCE IMAGE FOR PAINTING- select a photo from your origami creations used for the hands to eyes unit or create and photograph another origami piece
A few acrylic painting tips:
Keep your brush water clean! Dirty water makes for dirty colours. It’s a good habit to get into that when you can’t see through the water anymore (it looks like cream soup) dump it out and get fresh water.
Keep the paint out of the ferrule and brushes clean
Keep a cloth handy to dry off the brush once it is cleaned. If there is water left in the brush the colours will be runny.
This stuff dries fast! Make sure to let an area dry completely before trying to paint over it again (if trying to correct a mistake). Acrylic dries from the top down and sometimes it will appear dry but when another layer is added the paint from underneath will “lift” causing a white area because the new paint is pulling up the half dry paint underneath. This also happens if an area is overworked too long before moving on.
below photo Courtesy of Rolleston College art students
Origami painting
This will be painted on card approx A4 size.
prepare your surface by priming with gesso and doing a primer wash of either pale grey or sepia
select your colour scheme - you are to use a Triadic colour scheme. One colour for the background, one for the table and one for the origami [Tints and shades of each]
Use a large brush to paint in your background colour and tabletop colour [don't make it flat - if using purple mix the red and blue on the board to show texture and depth]. dry brush a lighter hue of your colour over the top.
Tape a photocopy of your origami photo to the board (with transfer paper in between with graphite side facing down if using transfer paper) so it stays put while you transfer the image. lightly mark out your origami shapes and lines
Print a greyscale version of your photo to use while you paint, as a reference of where the correct values and transitions need to be. There should be smooth transitions of values and Crisp edges where the paper creases are.
PROCESS AS SLIDESHOW - CLICK HERE
PROCESS VIDEO - below
