Surrealism Collage

For this project I sort of wanted to make you look twice to see what was actually going on. When making my collab, I knew that for my textures I wanted to add water and rocks, so I added the river to the sky of the piece to sort of create an odd look. This piece was one that took me a while simply because of layering and because of the need to mix the paint in order to get the shade I desired. At first I was quite worried about how the realistic parts of the water and the rocks would turn out but I am actually semi satisfied with the result. Although I did mix and try and get a shade of grey that was close to but still distinguishable from black, The horizon line and the background of the sky ended up meshing together (along with the figure walking into the distance). This project relates to my life because I chose the images that I put together, when choosing magazines the only ones I could find with images that appealed to me were those inside time magazines, and I put together images that I found interesting and that I knew the colors would look well together. I knew from the start I wanted to experiment more with grays and blacks than I did color, but still added the blue in order to give life to the piece. The part I was most excited about when making this was the white splatters, although they do not look like the original image, I still enjoyed making them and still enjoy how it turned out.

For this project I purely used canvas as well as acrylic paint. The orientation of my project was square which is something I had never really worked with much before, but I really enjoyed working in that specific orientation. It was sort of easier to map out sizes and map out where everything would go. At first I was nervous about how I would translate my collage to paper because a large mount of this was realistic and I was unsure how to paint realistically. For this project I mostly used black and grays, however, I did use blue for the water and white for the splatters on top of the piece. To make these splatters I actually grabbed a new and unused toothbrush, and covered the bristles with paint before flicking them onto the piece. I like what they added to the piece and I enjoyed using that specific material as it was something I had never done before.

The first step was the sketch. I did a freehand sketch of everything in order to map out where the different colors and textures would go. I began by simply painting the black of the background, in between the sections of the rocks and river. After that I began to mix the paint that would go on the ground. I noticed that it was gray, but it was very close to black, however even when mixing the paint I believed I got the shade I desired when the paint dried I found that everything was very dark. I moved past this and began to focus on the river and the rocks. Although I feel that painting realistically would be fun, I still had no practice with it so I was scared of how I would bring this specific part of the piece to paper. In the end I really liked the process of painting this specific part as well as the result. It was really fun to mix the different shades of gray and blue in order to try and make shadows and highlights and make these things something other than just flat color. My project evolved from just the sketch to something that is recognizably related to the collage, my next steps could be to continue practicing paint.