Studio #2: Landscape/Oceanscape

For our second studio project we were required to pic a ocean landscape of our choice. The idea of this painting is to paint the background first and bring the foreground forward (esp. clouds and things that are closer, forward). This was probably my hardest choice in terms of conceptualizing the piece as my own and as you would later see that my final product was completely different.

The above image was the initial picture I chose to work with. The media that I used was acrylic paint. I used the same size canvas as my previous studio project and mainly used a flat brush to achieve a full coating and saving more paint.

Progress:

I first began by making a light sketch of the cloud and divided the sky with the ocean. Laying down aquamarine paint first for the sky and then mixing together some blues and greens. I mixed vermilion and white paint to make the rich salmon/pink color and use a tissue paper to lift some of the paint off the clouds for effects. The shading effects for the ocean was made possible by adding a little black and mixing it on my canvas with a flat brush. You can also use your fingers to mix them on your canvas which is what I did to make the dark effect on the green and the neon-ish color near it. Note: Showing it to friends and relatives and asking them what do they see, they thought the pink area was solid land when initially it should look like the cloud's reflection reflecting off the ocean. The pink is supposedly meant to symbolize the sunset rays spilling off the clouds and reflecting off the ocean. I obviously failed.

By this stage it has become more apparent that I was straying off the original image I intended to follow. I spotted so many wrongs in this painting stage, that awkwardly deformed circle on the upper right was initially supposed to be a faded cloud or the sun but I failed to achieved that. The cloud on the left, I couldn't copy the cloud effect that Mr. Wonenberg taught us. It looked more apparent that the orange side of the "ocean" didn't seem to look like an ocean but LAND which made me fail miserably. The sticks that was supposed to get bigger as they came closer and smaller as they grew farther was just a mess (I initially thought of innovating those to make a bridge crossing the land and ocean but failed) because my hands were shaky and the blue clouds should have at least be consistent with the other cloud by having some pink on it, although I realized that the new blue cloud was a great innovation which my friend Leeza suggested when she came over in Painting class to observe and critique my work. The only things I liked in this part was my shading especially with the initially salmon colored side - turned orange. It reminds me of a painting glowing in the dark or with a hint of neon orange. I achieved such colors by painting over the salmon pink and mixed vermilion, yellow and a little of that dark green acrylic to make such shaded effects.I also liked the blue cloud and had fun with it. The technique I used was lifting the colors up. Leeza suggested that I stroked a light color blue across that part of the canvas and rub the tissue up, down and in circles to achieve a smoky cloud effect. To shade the blue clouds darker (because the under part should be darker) i dotted a little black and rubbed it in with the tissue as well.

Final Product:

So as you can see there are a lot of major differences from the previous stages and the original image. It took me a while to remove the sticks from the ocean and up close you would see those uneven blotches of horrible sticks protruding on my painting. In my final product I decided to remove the big cloud all together and stretched out the blue clouds instead. I had to paint over various "blues" to cover it up (which was almost a fail because my paint was watery (30% rule). I also decided to innovate by adding brown mountains to cover up my failure. The milky look on the mountains was achieved by dragging down white paint using a flat brush and lifting some of it with a tissue paper. I also reflected some of the sun light on the ocean for my final product and the sun was achieved by tracing half of circular object. Mr. Wonenberg commented that my concept was good, he liked the milky or fuzzy feel. He also asked me an important question that I didn't consider: The sun. If you looked closely, my sun was fuzzy. He asked me if I intended it that way or not but having it fuzzy or not would have been fine because it may not have been my intention.

Overall this painting was one of those paintings I had to think about and kept changing. I also learned from Mr. Wonenberg that I had to pay attention to details or think about what I really want because it can be interpreted in different ways than intended.