Surrealist Collage

Artist statement: The main focus of this unit was to learn about surrealism and surrealist works as well as how to implement color design into surrealism. The first activity we did was to search through magazines and find random pictures or words that stood out to us and then glue them onto a piece of 9" x 12" paper to create a "Surrealism Collage". After this we then tried to best copy this collage on canvas with acrylic paint, matching the colors and shape to the collage. In order to create depth it was necessary to add a little bit of black to a color and if you wanted to create a shine effect you would a dd a little white to the color, other than that it was just about finding the closest color through trial and error of color mixing. The materials that were used to create this work were acrylic paints and paint pens. I tried to experiment with different paint brushes to create more detail but in the end I usually used a medium wide paint brush that wasn't too big or too small. To mix paint I used the palette and palette knife to mix paints to the color that I needed them to be so they would match the collage. This could be tedious but eventually I got pretty close to the colors that would match the collage. Sometimes it was necessary to put multiple coats of paint on in order to create a relatively solid color. The paint pens were needed to add detail and shine to certain items like the red shoe and the emerald. The materials for this project were again fairly simple. The main reference that I used was obviously the surrealism collage. I had to look back and forth between that and the painting to see how I could match color and shape. I did decide to leave a few things out of the painting that were in the collage. For example, I left out the emerald bracelet because there was already an emerald in the painting. I also changed the background color to blue in order to better represent the color of the sky. No matter how many changes I made to the painting it would still be surrealism as long as the elements weren't directly related and they had some sort of message. Overall, I thought this wasn't a bad unit but I am glad to move onto something else other than painting.