Acrylic Painting

This acrylic painting was inspired by Mortis Ghost.  This is a piece of artwork he did based on his game, OFF, which includes images of various locations throughout the story.



In my painting, I used a number of techniques.
After creating a dark blue background, I used a sponge to add some black and purple, creating an interesting texture.
When I added the pink buildings, I used a palette knife to apply the paint.
The edges of the buildings are distinguished by thick paint, which physically stands out from the rest of the painting.  This is called impasto.
The white line across the top is meant to be a glaze, however, I mixed the paint and glazing medium in an incorrect proportion, resulting in it being less transparent than intended.
"Sgraffito" means "to scratch", which I used to then define the shape of the flowers.

Although I did manage to integrate quite a few painting techniques into my work, I feel as if the painting itself is too simple.  One critical element of Mortis Ghost's art style that I missed was the use of black outlines.  In the end, I did make an interesting tribute.

Watercolor Monsters

This is the water color monsters project.



In the first image are 4 sketches for possible monsters.

Designing them was an exercise in rhythm.  We focused on four main types of rhythm to use in artistic composition: regular, flowing, progressive, and alternating.
Regular rhythm takes the motif and uses it repeatedly in a similar way.
Flowing rhythm is more organic and flowing with its motif.
Progressive rhythm shows more of a sequence of change in the motif.
Alternating rhythm uses multiple motifs, which alternate.

The first sketch uses alternating rhythm in the background, with stars and lines, and flowing rhythm in the foreground with the shape of the monster.
The second sketch uses regular rhythm in the background, with evenly spaced diagonal lines (which in the final piece are bands of color), and progressive rhythm in the foreground, with feathers that gradually go from small to large.
The third sketch is dominated by the monster, giving it very little space for background, but an attempt was made to fill it with shapes of flowing rhythm.  The monster itself has regular rhythm in the triangular teeth.
The fourth sketch features alternating rhythm, with the monster having a curled appendage then a spiky appendage.  Background lines radiate outward from the center, gradually getting further and further apart as a progressive rhythm.

The first two sketches came more easily to me and were more inspired, but after making those and being happy with them, I had difficulty thinking of a couple more ideas that could possibly be better.  The two sketches alone had already displayed all four types of rhythm, but I overcame my difficulties by combining rhythms in different ways.  Those first two did ultimately end up as my final two paintings, though.



Once I had my sketches, I selected two to use for my final watercolor painting.  However, before I could begin painting, I practiced 15 techniques with watercolors. These were:

• Graduated wash - Starting with a solid color and adding more and more water
• Blending wash - Starting with one primary color and gradually mixing in another primary color
• Bleeding - Painting two very wet colors next to each other
• Feathering - Painting with water, then applying some color
• Wet into wet - Filling an area with color, then painting with another while it's still wet
• Wet on dry - Painting lines on dry paper
• Dry brush - Painting with very little water
• Lifting out - Using a dry brush to remove color from a still-wet area
• Water blooms - Dropping a small amount of water into still-wet paint to push pigment away
• Masking tape - Covering an area with tape before painting (I used this twice in the square, making areas covered with only green or blue, areas with green AND blue, and areas with no color)
• Masking fluid - Covering a (more controlled) area with masking fluid before painting
• Rock salt - Sprinkling salt on still-wet paint and removing it once dry, creating a textured look
• Splattering - Loading a brush with paint and using my thumb to spray it onto the paper
• Tissue paper - Dabbing partly-dried paint with tissue to create a textured look
• Plastic wrap - Putting crinkled plastic wrap on a painted area until dried to create a textured look

 

As discussed earlier, the final sketches I used for the paintings were the first and second one.

After lightly sketching the general shapes of my monsters, the first parts painted were the backgrounds.  For the first monster, the background was first painted yellow, then had masking fluid covering areas that would form the motifs of alternating rhythm, to let the rest of the background be painted a much darker mix of blue, purple, and black.  As for the second monster's background, it was first done in blue and brown, with the bleeding technique used so as to soften the line between the air and the ground.  Masking tape was put over the blue portion of the background, so as to leave stripes for adding a layer of purple.  This resulted in what should have been the regular rhythm in this piece, but some paint bled through the masking tape's edges.

Once the backgrounds were finished, I could safely begin painting the monsters themselves.  I first painted second monster, as I was more certain of what I wanted to do.  I first filled in the area with light gray, then used a graduated wash in the main body to emphasize the progressive rhythm in the feathers.  The eye was painted bright orange as a compliment to the blue background.  For the first monster, I filled in the area with light orange, and did darker parts with brown.  I really like graduated washes.  The more visible "ear" was done by layering yellow.

When the painting was done, final details were added with a pen, such as a line in the first monster, and all the feathers of the second monster.  The lines for the feathers were drawn imperfectly, leading to some parts being drawn more thickly to hide rough edges, which led to the rest of the lines being thickened to match.  I have seen examples of artists doing detailed watercolor paintings with feathers, but I was concerned about making them too dark for my piece, which is why I opted to draw the feather shapes back in at the end with pen.

Overall, 8/8 would buy again.

Gouache Painting

This is a gouache still life painting using a monochromatic color scheme.  A monochromatic color scheme has one color and all its tints (adding white), shades (adding black), and tones (adding gray).
At the side you can see three strips where I painted different tints/shades/tones of blue, which were then used in the actual painting.
Like in the drawing unit, the process began with rendering out the shape and doing the outer contour line.  Light and dark placement was done with the lightest tint and darkest shade, for highlights and shadows.  The rest of the mixed colors were used for other parts.
I chose blue because I thought its tints/shades/tones would look nice, but it ended up being a challenge for the actual still life part.  My original object was red, so I had to translate the red I was seeing into a vague idea of how bright or how saturated the color was.  Tones of blue were used around the edges of the "sections" to help separate them.

Map Color Schemes

This is a color scheme exercise, featuring abstract patterns based on a collage of maps.

Left has tetrad featuring yellow, violet, blue-green, and red-orange.
A tetrad is a 4-color scheme with two pairs of complimentary colors (opposite on the color wheel).  The two pairs are yellow and violet, and blue-green and red-orange.  Because of that, two colors are on the warm side (yellow, red-orange) and two on the cold side (violet, blue-green).  To create the tertiary colors, I had to blend primary and secondary colors by coloring those areas with both pencils.

Middle has triad featuring red-orange, blue-violet, and yellow-green.
Triads are 3-color schemes where the colors are evenly spaced apart on the color wheel, resulting in 2 cold and 1 warm (or vise versa).  I enjoyed blending tertiary colors in the first one, so my choices were such that I would have all tertiary colors.  One regret I have is not applying water in the order from lightest to darkest.

Right has split-complimentary featuring orange, blue-violet, and blue-green.
A split-complimentary color scheme has 3 colors, with 2 being adjacent to the compliment of the other 1.  Like the triad, there is also 2 cold and 1 warm (or vise versa), but the difference is much more obvious.  This one is my favorite of the three.  I'm a fan of cyberpunk artwork, which is often dark cityscapes with a contrast between blue and orange.  To focus the color scheme on blue, that was the side I chose to split into 2 colors, while orange was only used for accents.

Self Portraits

Neither of these portraits are finished, but that's not going to stop me from writing!

On the left is an observed self portrait, done by looking at myself in the mirror.  To start, I used basic proportions to place all of the main features.  Eyes are halfway down the head, and the width of them is such that five go across.  Halfway down again is the space between the nose and mouth.  The corners of the mouth matched up to somewhere in my eyes.  The height of my ears would have been from the top of my eyes to the bottom of my nose, but because of my hair, they weren't visible.

Because I was working more on the second self portrait, I didn't get to finish this one.  Using my actual reflection as a reference was challenging, because I wasn't constantly still, and I had actually gotten a haircut at one point.  However, if I had finished it entirely, I believe that my placement of the facial features would have made a good foundation for an accurate final portrait.

On the right is the second self portrait, done using the grid technique.  I drew a grid over a printed photograph of myself (which was edited to be in grayscale and have a limited number of values), and a corresponding grid of the same size on a blank sheet of paper.  By making a window with pieces of scrap paper, I could focus on one square at a time, and draw only what I saw in it.

This portrait was much more finished and looked much more realistic than the first one.  The easiest parts were areas where the hair was pretty much solid black, and the more challenging squares were in the face proper and the top of the hair (hence why they aren't completely finished yet).  Although it does look pretty good, and have all the shading and the range of values, (besides the empty squares) there's some places where white space is visible as lines between the squares.  I wasn't working on them as I went along, so I only did a few before I had to go photograph the drawing at its current stage.

I like to draw myself, especially in a stylized way.  These portraits weren't so stylized, but even so, I managed an ok job.

Cityscape

This cityscape is a 2 point perspective drawing.

A horizontal line marks the horizon, and the two vanishing points are on it (but off the main page. The horizon line was extended with extra paper.)

Any vertical lines in the drawing are parallel, but all other lines were drawn towards either vanishing point using a ruler to align it.  For example, the middle building has lines defining the edge of the roof and the edge at the ground, but on the left of the center they go to the left vanishing point, and on the right it goes to the right vanishing point.

This gives the effect of the buildings appearing smaller as they are more distant from the viewer.  While the far-right building is drawn with a slightly taller line than the middle one, the perspective effect actually makes it twice the height.

Details on the buildings were also drawn by using the vanishing points, and not only the outlines of the buildings.  The design on the far left building is a simple grid.  The circle on the mid-left building, the text on the middle building, and the hearts on the far-right building were all made by first constructing rectangles, then drawing inside of them.  The windows on the left side of the middle building also appear to sink into the building somewhat, because of lines inside of them that actually lead to the right vanishing point.

Some specific successes in this project were the circle and the mixtape advertisement, because despite not specifically fitting to the lines, it was still done well.  I found this to not be very difficult overall, since I've worked with perspective drawings before.

However, there was a challenge with making things look proportional.  I felt that the size of the windows, doors, and sidewalks were off.  As I was drawing the buildings closer to the sides and with lines closer to the horizon line, it was difficult to distinguish the angles of the lines.

Line Exercise

This page was an exercise in producing lines using many different tools, with both the additive and reductive methods.

I used markers of different thicknesses.  At the right is a part where I created an vertical implied line using thick marker.  Around the center circle were lines made with thin marker, and a few thicknesses of marker defined the shape to the right of the circle.

A few different pencils were used in some places.  It was quite easy to make thicker lines and smudge the soft pencils, while the harder pencils could make thin, defined lines.

Charcoal lines go all the way up the right edge, as if everything is being pulled towards the darkness of the bottom corner.

ALSO I REALLY REALLY REALLY LIKE THE PEN THAT YOU DIP IN THE INK??? IT'S SO GUD. I L♡VE IT. I WANT MY OWN.
I used it like ALL over the place pretty much everywhere!! <3 For thick lines and for thin lines, and for making dots, both huge and tiny, for waving, curly lines and for lots of straight lines... You almost can't really see the pencil lines at the bottom section because the ink lines are sooooo pretty.  There's many thin lines around the circle that vary in length, getting longer and shorter, in a pattern that reminds me of sound waves.

As well as doing lots of lines, I also created some textures with stippling, hatching, and cross-hatching in some spaces.  The hatching in the bottom right corner gives the impression that the entire section is being pulled towards the corner of the paper.  There's a line of boxes near the top left corner that I also did with the pen.  I never really got to experiment with using a brush to apply ink, because much of the page was already covered at that point.

For parts of the page I used the reductive line method, which is to create lines by removing material instead of adding it.  I colored some spaces using oil pastels and painted over them with black paint.  Once the paint dried, I used some scratching tools to remove the paint and create lines.  I especially used thick lines in the center circle, and many small thin lines in the left section.  Thick and thin was contrasted in the top corner.  Unfortunately, I had painted some parts too thick and the paint chipped instead of being carefully scratched away...

A reductive line method I wish I could have used was to color an area with pencil and use an eraser to remove it, which is something I've seen somewhere else used to an interesting effect.

Filling the entire page with so many different types of lines resulted in a very interesting piece, and it was a good experience to test out so many different tools.  I love that darn pen..