Monday 16 July 2012

Project 8: Still Life with Background: Final Design

Which Idea should I do for my Final Piece?











Out of all the preliminary sketches the three ideas I prefer and the three above, all of these paintings I have spent in between 4 and 6 hours on each one starting from the idea stage to the finished painting. All of the ideas have had something to do with my niece staying with us for the last couple of weeks, the bath toys we had to buy as she wasn’t too happy with just having a couple of empty bottles in the bath to play with. I think I prefer the last two with the bath toys, idea 02 has a meaning to the design where idea 03 is just really a pleasant image. It’s hard to choose which one to use for my final piece but I have decided to use Idea 03 as I really like the composition and the elements. Without working out the colour scheme and design for Idea 02 than Idea 03 wouldn’t have happened. All I’ve got to work out now is what medium and size and material of support I should use. I really want to use oil paints but I know this project needs to be handed in and it wouldn’t be dry in time which was a lesson learnt in the last project. I don’t want to do a small piece I much prefer them larger but any image larger then 20x16” I would have to buy an expensive frame on the internet and keep my fingers crossed that the frame would get here in time. 














I needed to reproduce my A3 painting on to a 30X20” Canvas board, the first thing I did was to scan the original painting into Photoshop at 300%. I then printed out the enlarged painting in greyscale on A3 cartridge paper; I didn’t require the colours so there wasn’t much point in wasting all the coloured ink. I then pieced the A3 prints out together with masking tape to make it the correct size. The 30x20” canvas panel was slightly larger in height which gave me a bit more space to play with.  I used the rules of the thirds to align the composition better and made use of the extra space on the larger support.














Rather than using tracing paper or a projector I’ve used Royal & Langnickel’s Graphite Paper. This works in the same way as carbon paper but it uses graphite instead which you can remove with an eraser. The piece I’ve used has been used many times over and I need some new pieces but the shops locally haven’t got any in stock at the moment so I’ll have to make do with the old stuff. I used an embossing tool to press down on the original print out, this way I’m not making pencil marks over the original print out. Once this is done I had to go over some lines with a pencil as the graphite paper no longer had any graphite left in certain places.














I decided to add a towel in the background, the only other thing I could think of is added the end of a shower curtain rail. I did try both and this one looked slightly better so I transfer the image over. The reason I was adding the towel is because the brief stated it needed a background. The other ideas both had decent background however as this was just a bath it didn’t really have any background. In the end I felt it was better without the drawing of a towel so in the end I used Gesso to get rid of it as I had already used fixative to fix the graphite. I felt if I mentioned this in the evaluation and explain why it didn’t have really a background then it would be satisfactory.














I needed a copy of the drawing that was on the canvas for two reasons. The first was just in case everything went totally wrong I could easily start again if I had a copy of the drawing. The other reason was in case I needed to do the painting again at a later date or I needed proof that this was my painting which I could prove if I had the original drawing.














As I had already worked out the colour scheme out on the original A3 painting I decided to get on with it and do the painting in the same colours and just the same method. I started by killing the white of the canvas by using Cobalt Blue acrylic paint mixed with a substantial amount of water. All of this painting is just an under painting and will be painted over with a thicker mix of paint later.


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