Midterm Prompt

Waterlilies

This is my Midterm prompt circle painting of a river with lilypads, vines, a half moon and the blue sky that is 9x12. This relates to my life because this idea was inspired by Claude Monet, who is a my families favorite artist as we have a few of his paintings hung up at our house. To make this artwork, I first started out with sketching my design in pencil, and then went over it in watercolor because I wanted to use a different material since I'm always using only acrylic paint, and this was my last art class. I then decided to go over the lilypads in acrylic paint to make them pop more, and then added the vines with acrylic paint as well to make them very strong in opacity. The edges of all the circles started to get messy, and my original plan was to go over the edges in white, but then I thought to make the whole background black so the circles would stand out, and I think that emphasized the circles pretty well. While making this project, I used an oval shape throughout the bottom for the lily pads, and also the half moon. I wanted to make my water look close to Monet's which is why the bottom is a darker purple and it fades into a lighter blue. I tried to balance everything out by making sure the lily pads were proportioned equally through the circles, and same with the lines. Going into the project, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to think of an idea quick, given the amount of time we had. The day before the project, my mom and I were talking in our dining room where our big Claude Monet waterlily painting is, and she told me the story of how she got it. I couldn't get the painting out of my mind, and the idea of trying to make my own waterlily painting came in mind. I had an exact idea in my head of what I wanted, and I painted it. The only thing that changed was that the lily pads were originally watercolor, but I thought they didn't look sharp enough and they sort of blended into the water, so I went over them in acrylic paint. My next steps would be probably pushing the sky further and try to create some sort of design there, or making sure the black background was very deep in color with no splotches.