Project 8: Still Life with Background: Primary Ideas

First Possible Idea for the Final Piece.

The first idea I have included the cakes and my niece, I had a look through the photographs I took of the cakes and also of the photographs of my niece eating a cake. I’ve decide to make a composite painting compiled by using selections of different photographs. My niece has been staying with us for a couple of weeks whilst she was on half term from school. It’s a long time since I had a five year old shouting me every few minutes but now she’s gone home it’s too quite. I started off by doing a sketch of the cakes as the still life required a background I put in the corner of my living room. This is only a study and took me around 3 hours to complete so it’s not detailed and quite naïve.

The idea has been put together using photographs of the cakes; my niece was put into the image as she wanted to eat the cakes before I had finished with them. I wanted to get rid of the white of the paper so I filled in the table very quickly the paint was watered down, it was drying out really quickly I don’t know if this had anything to do with the layer of fixative of the acrylic paper. 

After painting the table in I started painting the icing on the cake and the face as they were both a shade of pink. The yellow cake I’ve used an Artist Acrylic paint which is the only artist colour I have as it was a free sample, all of my other acrylic paints are student colours but decent brands not the cheap paint. At this point I was still killing the white of the paper and not really looking out for details. The background was filled in; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the background at first. I started the drawing with just the cakes on the cake stand with a table the rest just got added naturally. The background is a corner of the living room with a game consoles kinetic box on top of the TV as the kids don’t have enough room in their bedrooms to use it. The Cake stand I used was white but I’ve decided to change it to a metal one to match the original base. It’s not looking too bad as an under painting but I I’m rushing it as I know it’s not going to be a finished piece. I finally went on to the Belgium Bun and started on the icing, more work was done on the other cakes adding further details to them. I feel like I’m coming along nicely with the painting and it hasn’t taken me that long to get to this stage. Shadows and detail were added to the cake stand and a bit of decoration was added to the lip of the stand as it looked quite basic. A liquid was added to the glass and a change of colour with the straw as the colour wasn’t working in that particular place with the surrounding colour. Dvd’s were added to the bookcase, I decided to give the middle shelf something else on it instead of dvds to break up the same shapes on all the shelves.

DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE IMAGES AGAIN ONCE THEY HAVE LOADED FOR A LARGER IMAGE...

Finished Study 01…

The one thing that was really bugging me with the painting so far is the portrait in the background. Finally I have got it to a stage where I’m happy with the painting, it needed a larger forehead and the hair wasn’t looking correct. Once this was done the skin and eyes took some doing but thankfully they are a lot better than in the image to the left. In the rest of the image more details were added without going over the top. I could have spent a lot longer on the picture but I didn’t need to this as it was only a study and I had more studies and ideas to come up with. From the being drawing to the end painting it has taken me about 4 hours to complete to the stage it is at now, this is good for me as I can really get bogged down with the details and could spend hours just refining the details. If I were to do this again I would like to try it in Oil Paints.