Thursday, April 7, 2011
10:48 AM | 
Posted by
Rebecca Aragon
Phew, it's been a crazy week or so. Projects had piled up on me and I wasn't able to get around to sharing! But thanks to one of those projects, at least, I have some fun things to share with you, readers. One of the projects that had me so busy was a painting project for which we had to paint nine small, 1'x1' canvases or framed panels. Going into it, I was concerned by the number of them, and the rather short time we had to finish the project. However, it is now one of my favorite projects we have done. I feel like I learned quite a bit, and really had some fun playing around with things that I've never been brave enough to try before.
The assignment required that for the first small painting, we started by responding to a part of our last painting (for me, that was the large Janet Fish still life). For the second painting, we responded to the first small one in some way; for the third, we responded to the second, and so on and so forth, so that it was like a visual game of telephone in a way. My final series wound up looking a little bit on the random side, the connections being more conceptual than visual, but that's okay with me. I wanted to use the project to experiment and stretch myself. I wanted to try new things and play around with mediums.
I painted all of them using acrylics and acrylic mediums, which in itself was a stretch. I've gotten so comfortable with oils that going back to acrylic was a little irritating at times. I really wanted to play with the various acrylic mediums that our professor had shown us, though, so it was worth it to me to put up with the acrylic paint in order to allow for the experimentation!
So, enough talk, let's get down to it! The first few paintings in the series:
The assignment required that for the first small painting, we started by responding to a part of our last painting (for me, that was the large Janet Fish still life). For the second painting, we responded to the first small one in some way; for the third, we responded to the second, and so on and so forth, so that it was like a visual game of telephone in a way. My final series wound up looking a little bit on the random side, the connections being more conceptual than visual, but that's okay with me. I wanted to use the project to experiment and stretch myself. I wanted to try new things and play around with mediums.
I painted all of them using acrylics and acrylic mediums, which in itself was a stretch. I've gotten so comfortable with oils that going back to acrylic was a little irritating at times. I really wanted to play with the various acrylic mediums that our professor had shown us, though, so it was worth it to me to put up with the acrylic paint in order to allow for the experimentation!
So, enough talk, let's get down to it! The first few paintings in the series:
NUMBER ONE:
This first one I took from the section of the larger painting with the little tea cups. I painted it as representationally as I could, but left out the purple, swirly shadows from the first layer. Once it had dried, I went back in with acrylic pouring medium (cool stuff!) and poured a thin layer of that over the whole thing. I left that to dry overnight. The next day, I poured a second layer of pouring medium, and into it I swirled watered down purple paint in this swirly pattern. So there's actually a little depth between the layers thanks to the pouring medium that's not entirely visible here. Also, the bright white shine is due to the pouring medium.
NUMBER TWO:
For this one, as I tried to think about the first one and where to go with it, I just kind of got stuck on the idea of the tea cups, even though you couldn't really tell at first glance that the circular shapes in the first one were tea cups anymore. I found an old version of Alice in Wonderland lying around the house and decided to use the pages from the "Mad Tea Party" chapter and the illustrations from it. I loved the idea of using the antiqued pages and classic ink drawings. I still incorporated the swirls from the previous painting as well, but this time I made them three dimensional by using flexible modelling paste under a blue wash. I used clear gesso to collage down the pages and a very, very watered down wash over parts of it to incorporate the various parts of the painting into one another.
NUMBER THREE:
Well, now I was stuck on Alice in Wonderland. It was just too fun to let go of right away. So I started looking through the book for other illustrations that I liked, and found this one. I drew it onto watercolor paper, using the illustration as reference, and then inked over it with a pen. I put a light blue wash over the drawing, and then I ripped the drawing into pieces. I first tore out the whole drawing, then tore one of the cards (the one on the left) away from the others. I used other scraps of the paper, all with color wash of either blue or orange, and collaged them onto the panel using flexible modelling paste to put them at various levels and to create texture on visible areas or over parts of the paper.
NUMBER FOUR:
Cards, roses, roses, cards...What to do...Why not make a rose out of cards!? So I did. This rose is made out of playing cards and attached to the board and to itself using the same flexible modelling paste (I discovered this to be quite the versatile stuff). Took a while, but I was pretty pleased with it. I painted the background the same red as was on the back of the cards themselves, but left some of the brush marks slightly visible, and darkened one side. I then copied the same design that goes up the sides of the cards into the corner, and let that kind of dissolve into splatter by the right side of the painting.
Ok! I'm going to let this post be a "to be continued." Check back in a few days for the last five in the series!
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Welcome!
About Me
- Rebecca Aragon
- Hi! I'm a college student from Texas, getting an undergrad in painting. I'm enjoying life and discovering who I am in my art as I go along. I'm a painter and a graphic artist and I dabble in all sorts of other mediums as well.
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