Final Still-Life Painting

Purpose:

• To communicate all of your knowledge about color and painting techniques to create a final, more complex, still-life painting (than your smaller still-life studies);

• To use your knowledge about composition and placement to arrange your fruit and/or vegetable to create a strong composition.

Artist Studied: Georges Seurat

After reading my still-life studies blog post, I noticed that I did use the techniques that I mentioned. I had gotten a little frustrated with the pallet knife I remember so I did make the decision to not use that as my painting tool. I instead used a paint brush. It was easier to control, like I said in my blog post, and I think I made the right decision in using it. I also mentioned in my blog post that I wanted to paint a pear and I wanted the background to be a peach color but I did not follow through on this idea. I think I didn’t follow through because I had to look at painting a lot more subjects than just a pear. I also wanted the background to match somewhat and thinking about a peach color at the background seemed like it wouldn’t be a good match.

I had learned many important things in the unit but three really stuck out to me. The first major thing I learned was everyone has their own style of art. I was focusing too much on what other peoples art work looked like because I thought their style of art was better than mine. But, after going through the process of painting, I began to like mine a lot more that I originally thought. I wasn’t judging mine as much or comparing it to other people art work. I think that was a major improvement throughout this project on my part because I began to like my art work even more. Another big thing that I learn about was how to build up the layers. At the beginning of this project, I wasn’t sure why we had to build up so many layers, but, I became clearer to me as I went through the whole process. I had begun with a light blue background then changed it to pink and then changed it to purple. Purple ended up being my final background. I also started with a lot lighter or darker colors on my fruits and adding layers to slowly lighten or darken it until it was the correct color started to make sense. This was so important because if I hadn’t added layers, I would have never gotten the finished products that I did. It also really payed off in the end. Lastly, I learned about different ways to create values for colors. Instead of adding just black or white, I began adding unusual colors together like yellow and brown or green and blue. Mixing those colors gave me a huge variety of colors in my art work and it makes it look unique. This was very important, also, because I wasn’t just changing the shade of the color, I was changing the color itself to look more lively in the end. Overall, I learned a lot about myself and painting in this project.