I've got my final exhibition for my art course coming up in the next few weeks, so a week or so ago I completed a painting (which is a prototype/ initial idea) for my final piece. I did this painting with erasable colouring pencils, HB pencil, acrylic paints, bin bags and a hot glue gun, and some fake plastic flowers.
These are the initial sketches that I did on the canvas that I was using! In the first picture, I've mostly done faces and a few hands, and I noticed that it seemed a bit too crowded with faces therefore I decided to add some full figures and a crouching figure. Looking back at this, I knew I wanted the crouching figure just to add some variety, but it does look like (in the finished piece) that I'm trying to create a piece to bring awareness to mental health or something? Just because of the general dark tones and sad/ blank looking faces. So that wasn't really my intention to be honest!
I painted the background/ border a very dark navy/black as I wanted the faces to be more illuminated and to peek through and stand out a lot. I also did this because I was going to be gluing rubbish bags around the painting and I didn't want the background colour to stand out too much against the rubbish bags.
I had a lot of difficulty getting the skin tones and the shading correct. So, a huge chunk of my time was spent doing that to the best of my ability... A day or so, even.
I need to work on the tones of fabric too, as I was trying to add some creases to a hoodie that the figure is wearing but that didn't work out too well.
I've been really stuck on ideas, especially for this final unit in my course.. I'm not entirely sure why, I think it has something to do with it being the end of my time on the course, which I'm really sad about- I've had a wonderful time and I feel like I've grown a lot in many ways. I've learnt a lot too!
My ideas for this piece were mainly to juxtapose the dark and the light (with colours and imagery too?) and the soft and harsh things (flowers and bin bags, faces poking through the bin bags). Not entirely sure how to explain this though.
Thank you for stopping by!