Inspired Art Project

The subject a lost canoe in the ocean at night. The setting is the ocean with a starry night sky. This artwork was influenced by Vincent Van Gogh's painting Starry Night, and Thomas Eakins Canoe racing paintings. First I made the artwork by, looking up a video on youtube on how to paint a night sky with watercolors, because I had used water colors but I wasn't very good at it. So I tried my best even though it didn't really look like the video, I thought it looked surprisingly good for just starting with watercolor. I made the sky by dabbing dark blue watercolor with a big paint brush. When the water color had dried, I splatter painted white paint for the stars. After this, I then started painting the water with a mixture of green, blue, and yellow watercolors. I used a video on youtube to help me, but it didn't really help so I just guessed what to do. I then started painting the details of the sky with white acrylic paint, and yellow watercolor paint, while looking at Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night" I knew it wasn't going to look exactly like it, which is good I guess, but I'm actually pretty proud of how the sky turned out. After everything had dried, I then drew a canoe like Thomas Eakins had a couple of times, with a brown colored pencil and tinted the water with the same colored pencil to make the water brownish like Thomas Eakins made the water look like in his paintings. I chose to create this specific artwork because I was assigned Thomas Eakins, and I have always liked Vincent Van Gogh's painting of "Starry Night," so I decided to combine "Starry Night" and some sort of boat on the water. Some specific elements and principles I used were, value, and contrast because of the lights and darks I painted in the sky and ocean to form the painting.

Composition rules and techniques I used, were grouping and informal balance. I used grouping by separating the sky, stars, wind, and moon, and the ocean, waves, and the canoe. I used informal balance in this artwork because most of the stars and wind are on the left, and only a couple of stars, and the moon is on the right, I put the canoe right in the space on the right to make it more aesthetically pleasing. One way my project evolved was, i was going to draw a sailboat in the wind, but I couldn't figure out how I wanted to compose it, and what the sails would look like, like if I colored them, would it clash with the rest of the painting? Then I realized Thomas Eakins didn't even draw sailboats, he drew canoe races. So I drew a lonely canoe instead.

The meaning behind the artwork is this, everytime I look at the stars through my window at night, I think of hope, and that if I am ever sad, I feel I will get better. The canoe on the other hand represents sadness and loneliness. So the meaning or story behind this artwork is, when you're feeling lonely or sad, just have hope that everything will get better, and it will. This project relates to my life, one, because "Starry Night," has always been my favorite painting from the time I was 7 or 8 years old, and 2 just like I said above, when ever I am feeling sad at night, I will roll over, and look out the window at the stars, and I immediately feel hope, and feel everything will get better. One thing that bothers me in this painting, is the water, I wanted it to fade from dark to light, from the right to the left, for the moon, so it looked like the mooning was shining light on the ocean, but it just looks kinda tacky. So if I had more time, or paid more attention to detail when I was painting it before it was too late, I would've added a little bit of darkness on the right edge of the paper making a path for the moonlight to be shone in the ocean, and look a little neater, and nicer.