Painting

12/10/2020

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Weeks 3 & 4

Watercolour

John Singer Sargent

From a distance these paintings look really detailed and concise but when you look closely, that's not necessarily the case. In the painting of the stream the water is just some blue and brown brush strokes but they're placed in a way that convinces the eye that its running water and it works really well. I feel a bit stupid saying that his art "works well" because obviously it does he's a renowned artist, I'm just a little out of my comfort zone with this as in the past I've only really used watercolours to colour in ink drawings, I've never really used them on their own to create a full piece so it'll be interesting.

I don't think I really like watercolour - not like this anyway, I enjoy it as a way of colouring in basically but for these I just absolutely went for it, no sketch or planning and they're not incredible in all honesty. They were really relaxing to do though which was nice and it was definitely good practice for me. Of all the paintings I've done for this post these are my least favourite but the lessons learned were valuable regardless. Or something like that.

Eric Ravilious

Eric Ravilious' work is more detailed but also less colourful than John Singer Sargent's - basically why I chose it. Their styles don't really have any similarities so I think its a good way for me to try two very different ways of working. Ravilious uses techniques like cross hatching which I feel isn't very commonly done in watercolours or paintings in general really but its something I like to do when drawing so this is a nice way for me to tie them things together.

Click the pics above for a closer look

This is the first of the watercolours I did so I was kind of just figuring it out as I went along. I painted the salt shaker before the pepper and you can definitely tell because the pepper shaker just looks way better. I should maybe address the festive shakers in October but this year has made no sense, time means nothing and if I want Christmas to start now then that's just how its going to be. Back to the work; I tried to keep my colours very muted to mimic Ravilious' style - which was quite hard to do with red. I do really like how it looks though, but the pepper is definitely better because i had more figured out what i was doing by then.

Acrylic

Brad Holland

My favourite paintings of Brad Holland's are the ones where his colour palette is very limited, as you can see I particularly like the brown/beige ones (how boring, I know) but something about just using earthy tones seems really interesting to me. I particularly like the pop of blue in the tie of the left hand picture, I also really like the fuzzy look of that one, it just makes it feel even more surreal and kind of fever-dream-ish.

Click the pics above for a closer look.

For this piece inspired by Brad Holland I tried to heavily consider my colour palette and my technique to result in a kind of fuzzy look. For my colours I just used a few orange tones, some browns, white and paynes grey. I wanted to entirely avoid using black, which is something I'm trying to do in any painting in general. As for my technique, I laid down large areas of colour with a bigger brush and then using a small (previously ruined) brush, I took very small amounts of paint and stippled it on in an effort to get the blurred edges. I had a really good time with this piece - it took me just short of two hours to do. I was worried about over-doing it an taking it too far which I might have done on the hand a little bit, I could have probably left it where it was in the sixth picture in the gallery above but even still, I'm really happy with how this piece cam out:)

Christian Hook

I LOVE Christian Hook's paintings, particularly the series of horses he did. I found this gorgeous dog painting too - could have done with it as a reference while I was doing my A level project on dogs! I really admire how insanely detailed but also messy and not detailed his pieces are. I really love how they almost look like a glitched image. I also really like the colour palettes used for these pieces, the neutrals with some blue and orange to add warmth and cold is really nice. There's a huge number of artists whose work I really love and admire but something about Christian Hook's work puts him right near the top for me, really excited to try out some work in his style!

Click the pics above for a closer look.

So this is Polly. I took inspiration from Christian Hook's dog painting but this one is actually really special to me. We got Polly when I was two years old and sadly she passed away this summer while we were all still in lockdown at the incredible age of 17. I didn't get to see her before she left us and this weekend gone I finally was able to go home again and having her not be there was really hard for me. I'm trying not to be too down about this, but I really wanted to do a little memorial piece for her and I feel like I've really done her justice.
Now actually about the process, it took me about 4 hours over two days to do this piece, its about 18x13cm so its fairly small. there's another painting that's already made it to the box under my desk that I started before this one, it was A3 (of the same picture) but I abandoned it about an hour in because although it was a decent painting, it just didn't capture the essence of Christian Hook that it needed to. I feel like this one really captures that though, and I really love how it came out - it was also really fun to do and I think I might incorporate this method into future works:)

Alejandro Sordi

While I was just scrolling on Facebook I saw these (first picture below) digital illustrations done for Cartoon Network by a Spanish illustrator called Alejandro Sordi so I followed the link to his website and was firstly greeted by such a beautiful illustration (second pic) and upon clicking the menu I found that he has a pretty huge collection of really beautiful acrylic paintings, I've included a couple of my favourites:

There's LOADS more on his website and more on his Instagram page too. As you can see, I got very tempted by one design he sells on clothing, as of right now I haven't bought it but don't be surprised if it ends up on my blog again later on hehe.

This very tempting button will open up his website if you want to go have a look yourself!

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