The Process of Painting - Acrylic

For those of you new to painting or if you needed a recap, we worked through the process of painting with acrylics today in class.

We looked at a simple sphere on a surface to specifically look at the skills of:

• Depth
• Perspective
• Proportion
• Tonal Range
• Shadows and Highlights

We also looked into the process of painting from thin to thick and dark to light

We started by COLOUR BLOCKING our tones in (either a warm of cold undertone to add depth). We did this by adding our gel medium to thin out our paints

- Use colour theory to sort your base colours - cool tones look far away, warm tones look closer to you. You are an illusionist with painting. - Once you have your base colours down, then you need to determine where the lights are and where the shadows are. NEVER use black paint at this point. If you really need it, use it at the end of your painting process, to strengthen the darkest areas only if necessary.- To mix a 'block' colour or dark shadow colour, look at the paints you have and select the darkest hues from opposite sides of the colour wheel and a tiny bit of yellow. That will usually result in a good dark tone. 

You don't need every colour in the universe on hand to paint, just the basics: red, yellow, blue, a nice clear purple helps (or magenta) and white. 

Build your paint up and paint with thicker paint than you would if you were using watercolour. less water and less paint is actually what you need. too much paint and you wont be in control. Same with too much water. 

You will be looking to build up careful layers, so if it's not quite right, so long as you haven't used too much paint underneath, you should be fine:

Remember to keep all your experiments as these will count as your evidence

Painting 2.2/2.3

These are the first practical standards we are aiming to complete. It is your starting point for the body of work that goes on your folio.



As you have developed your 'why', I have asked you to plan your folio. This was a rough plan, with thumbnail sketches.



In painting, planning like this will lead you to make art works:

Here is an example of some sketches we worked out with Kingston:
His why is:
Old school mafia in America - gangsters and romanticising them.

His artist models are:

James Rosenquist, "Day job painting"

Rosenquist
AskewOne











His subject matter is:
A man in a suit,
New York city
hands to wrap around the city
fingers in every pie (as the mafia had hold of new york)
Control through the force of guns

The first sketch on the top right is taking some compositional devices from Rosenquist - angles, cropping, images banging into each other and being cut off awkwardly, some layering of the subject, but no real space detailed.

The second sketch with the full figure is based on some Askew One ideas, where there is some layering of textures and lines that are almost abstract over and within the portrait. there seems to be a word used at the base of the askew one image, so we have attempted to play with that detail in Kingston's work here too.

Following on from here, It is Kingston's job to figure out a series of works that introduce his why more clearly and show how he is learning from his two artists.
The evidence he will collect as he goes:
- His brainstorm
- His subject matter as photographic or real sources (not out of his head)
- Notes and thoughts are written up on paper and on his blog
- Some careful observational drawing of his subject matter (3 - 4 A3 pages is good)
- His finished first series of paintings (at least 2 paintings)

Next step is to paint them and stick them on his board for the folio.