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.

2.2 & 2.3 Design

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.

You should have a basic brief at this point - follow the sheet I shared with you on my site to create one. I want you to answer more than one word for them as they will help you to create a clear brief.

You should have a mood board completed on a google drawing as well. If you download as a PDF, you can use it more freely in a range of programmes.  This should also be on your blog.

These two components set you up to be working systematically throughout the year. you will have a purpose and something to go back to when you get visually stuck. 

You have your 'why' - it is your brief. 

You have your visual sources on your mood board. You should have identified 3 specific artists to work on for Art History, these should be your first main influences for your design work on panel one. 

From your company name and your general visual direction, all our designers should have sketched up in pencil 20 basic concepts for a logo. 

Along with this, you should have looked on dafont.com and traced 15 or so different fonts using your company name. Your screens work well as a light table!

The evidence you should collect from all of this for these standards is:
- your brief worksheet
- brainstorm of ideas for your direction
- brainstorm of ideas for names- a mood board like the one above
- 15 or so font drawings on an a3 page
- 20 or so concept sketches thinking about logo design and your chosen design models 

Photography 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.

By now you should have your 'why', in the form of a brainstorm which is also a part of your blog post.

You should have chosen three photographers as the focus of your Art History which you then also use as your first major influence for your first folio board. 

2.2/2.3 looks roughly like this:

In developing this body of evidence you need to get the following skills sorted:

1) How to work the camera

2) How to upload your shots and make proof sheets out of them. the small photos in a grid are what we call proof sheets. - [there is a file on my site to take you through this process]

3) A good understanding of aperture and shutter speed, the rule of thirds and leading lines - compositional principles

4) How to open photoshop and do some basic editing (colour, layering etc)

These are skills you learn, not ones I expect you to know before we start out. 

There are four shoots here. Four separate times that the student has chosen to go and set up a shoot and record what they see. 

From each shoot, there should be 2 or 3 series of works that you like. A series of works should be 2 - 5 or more shots that work together. 

From each series, there should be one more spectacular shot that you would want to make more of a deal of. 

What do you need to do to create this body of work for yourself? 

Make a plan, show it to me. 

Level 1 Drawing - 1.2 use wet and dry media to record information

One of the standards we are attempting to tick off over the year requires you to prove that you can draw accurately from a visual source.

Things this standard does not include:
- Imaginary doodles
- Written notes
- Stuff you tried to draw to look real but without source material (a photo or a still life to show me)

Things this standard must include:
- Tone
- Perspective
- Detail drawing
- Proportional undertanding
- Dry media; pencil, charcoal, crayon, pastel, collage
- Wet media; water colour, paint, ink

The work that is done for these 4 credits can also be on your folio. because you are all doing different projects, what your drawing pages look like will all be completely different.

A rule of thumb for this standard is:
4 A3 pages of drawing (or enough to fill 4 A3 pages) in dry media
4 A3 pages of drawing/painting in wet media

The exemplars for this standard are here

If you have any tonal or detail/proportion pages started, KEEP them, they count. The stuff below is stuff that would count at a merit/excellence level:

Year 10 Printing Process

We are going to be doing a 3-part print which means you need to consider a few things:
1. the order that your prints are going to be printed (which is the background, mid ground and foreground)
2. What colours are going to make your focal point (bird) stand out best?

I have done a few trials and a few fails to gain the best outcome

*We can add cornflour to lighter colours to make them more opaque and less transparent so we can use them as top layers

A quick recap of Series and Sequences

What is a Visual Motif?

Today we went over the excellence exemplar from 2017 and looked at how you can be creating mini series of work within your folio and how you can be using different visual motifs to tie your board together as a body of work.

Series of works explain points of your work as a whole. You are trying to say something to your viewer in the way you construct your images. Think if it like an essay with an Introduction, Key points and then a Conclusion.