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.

Artists Studied: Vincent Van Gough, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne

I do think I used a lot of the techniques I used and wrote about in the studies. For this unit I really wanted to experiment with a new style and push myself out of my comfort zone in painting. I really enjoyed using a looser style and mixing on the canvas, although it did stress me out a bit at times. Overall I’m not as happy with the way the techniques look on the painting as I think I would be with my usual style, but given the experience of really just going for it I’m very happy with what i learned from using those techniques and I think it’s really expanded the ways in which I paint.

I learned a lot in this unit. Coming out of it, the first thing I realized from this assignment was the huge variation in styles that can all create interesting and realistic still-lifes. I have painted pretty much the same way my entire life, and haven’t ever really looked at other ways to paint or even other subject matter. I think this project is really going to push me as a painter in the future to explore other ways to portray realistic subjects. I also learned a lot about the use of color like how to effectively use a colors compliment, the big difference warm and cool values of a color make, and how the background colors affect the piece as a whole. I really enjoyed working with the background and seeing the changes made by lighting or darkening it or changing the texture of the strokes. The last thing I learned a lot about, and probably my favorite thing to experiment with, was texture. Through both doing the studies and my final I really wanted to work with the texture of acrylic paints and see how the worked built up. A large part of this project was the utilization of many layers of paint, which gave the piece a sort of body to it. I really enjoyed building up thicker and rougher strokes in paint, and exploring how different strokes could change the blending of color completely. Working with texture helped me to make the reflective part of the painting much more realistic, and I was really amazed at the difference small changes in texture could make. I think that part helped me, as an artist, to completely change the way I look a paint.