Scholastics #1

For this assignment I wanted to make a painting for the painting category of the scholastic awards. I had a lot of trouble coming up with an idea because all I knew was the materials I wanted to use. I started by looking through pictures I had taken on my phone and sketching a few ideas out using them as references. I decided to use a picture of my brother and I when we were little and I started painting it. After working on it for a while I gave up on it because it wasn't turning out how I wanted it to. I looked around for a new idea and decided to do an observational drawing of the mess I had made working on the first painting.

I moved some things closer together so I could fill more of the paper and then I sketched it out in pencil on watercolor paper. I tested both acrylic and gouache on a piece of scrap paper and then drew on them with colored pencil to see how that would work. I decided to use gouache because I could draw on it with colored pencil if I needed to. I didn't end up using the colored pencils but the gouache was a good choice because I was able to start with thinner layers and still see the pencil lines before I made it darker. Before I started painting I took a picture of the sketch and tested out a couple color combinations digitally.

I chose only primary colors because there was already a lot of stuff in the picture so I felt like it would look too cluttered if I used all of the actual colors. This created a sort of contrast between the subject and the colors because the subject is cluttered and messy but the colors are simple. This also gave me the opportunity to practice with values of one color. I was able to show the detail of the objects by using different values of red. Before I added the details I painted the background yellow and painted all of the shapes of the object with one shade of red. I thought about using blue for the shadows on the objects but I thought it would look better as just the shadows on the ground to make all the colors separate. By having all the objects the same color I created some unity between them. My project evolved as I tested different colors and changed the subject. My next steps could be to use other color simple color palettes in observational drawings.