Yosemite #8

Sustained Investigation #8

7 x 11

Gouache

This is my 8th Sustained Investigation where I painted a landscape scene of mountains from Yosemite National Park. I used a new material, Gouache for this painting because I like the look of watercolor, but I don't like using watercolor, and acrylic paint is my favorite medium to use, so Gouache was a really good material to use that was in between these two. My inquiry question is, "How can I use color and texture to concentrate on the emotions of landscapes?" When I went to Yosemite this summer, It was a very surreal experience. It was so dreamy to see the beautiful scenery in real life, it was almost unlifelike in a way, seeing all those intricate mountains, and all the bright greenery around. It truly felt like I was in a dream, which is why I wanted to replicate that feeling through my artwork. Instead of the traditional colors from the real scenery, I used colors that reminded me of a dazy dream which were light green and light purple. I kept the blue in the sky the same as it matched well with the green and light purple mountains, and added the clouds from the photo onto my artwork for more of that dreamy feel. To follow the color scheme, I painted the trees green/blue as well. I used the purple in the mountains to represent the shadows and also used many light shades of green for some more detailing/highlighting. When I first started this project, I was not going to go into a lot of detail, but after I started painting the mountains in a soft curvy way, I realized I didn't like how they looked. I went over parts many times to fix it as I just wanted to have a plain light green mountain with purple shadow and minimal detail, but I wasn't happy with the outcome. It looked more like hills, and when I thought of mountains, I thought of sharper edges, so I revised my painting to have sharper edges, focusing more on shading with different colors, and came out with my final project. I am very happy I revised my work, and I'm happy with the way it turned out. It looks a lot like how I wanted it to look in my head. I was nervous about how the trees were going to work with the mountains, but I think the colors contrast well. If I were to do some more revision, I'd make the edges darker so it didn't blend into the background as much, and refrain from painting in small strokes but instead paint a general shape of a tree. I am surprised the green and purple didn't clash to have a brown outcome but instead blended well together because I was nervous about that happening, and overall I was able to accomplish the emotion I wanted to portray in my painting.