Joker Painting- Getting Ready

I am continuing to work on the joker in water color. It is difficult to mix the colors right for the vest and pants. Its been difficult because it is just such a dark picture but if you use black it overpowers the rest of the colors already mixed. One way to make the paint darker is with primary colors such as red and blue. Mixing those colors together can make your color combos darker but not too dark. Shadows have also proven difficult in this piece mostly because ninety percent of the picture is shadows.  I also may not finish the water color version of this picture. I was only doing to get a feel for color mixtures and being able to apply them to specific areas. Once I feel comfortable enough with it I will move onto my acrylic version on a larger wood board canvas. Ive never worked on wood board canvas but it is just a canvas wrapped tightly around a board made of wood. This is different then a traditional canvas, which is a canvas wrapped tightly around a wooden frame. This means that the middle of the canvas has nothing supporting it and gives the canvas some give to it. The wood board canvas is flat underneath the whole canvas so the whole thing has no give to it. I think this will give me more control of the brush and the strokes I make which i think will be very beneficial to me and this piece. This will probably be the last post I will be doing of this piece in water color because once i figure out how to mix the purples for the pants I will move onto the canvas. I prefer working with acrylic paint because even if you mess up it is easy to go over it and fix it.

Joker Painting

Ive decided to go back and do another acrylic painting. Ive done acrylic paintings before, one of Biggie Smalls and the other of a cute puppy. I haven't done an acrylic painting in over a year so i'm challenging myself with a painting of the Joker. Im starting by practicing with water color first. I drew the picture of him sitting in a jail sell on a piece of water color paper so I could practice mixing the colors since it will be harder once I switch to the acrylic paint it will be harder to mix colors. After I finish the water color copy I will do it again on a canvas and do it again.

Water Woman Water Color

This project took me about three weeks of my class. I started by drawing a silhouette of a woman in the water on a thick piece of water color paper. From there I used an Exacto knife to cut out the silhouette of the woman. You have to do this slowly because it is hard to maneuver the Exacto blade around small curves. The edges of the silhouette were very frayed so I used a lighter to burn the edges lightly. At this point I was ready to start painting. I mixed my water colors to make a mix between green and blue. I simply painted circles around the woman with changing colors between green, blue and purple. I then painted a brown line to represent the coast and painted the grass green. It wasn't the actual creation of the piece that made this take three weeks but the mixing of color tones to make the water and grass look more interesting.

Water Color Silhouette Day 1

Day 1: I am starting a water color painting with a cut out silhouette in the middle. The silhouette is of a girl with her head down. I started by drawing the girl onto the watercolor paper. After that I used an Exacto knife to slowly cut the girl out of the paper. This took a good amount of time since there were lots of curves and edges so you must take your time. After I cut her out the edges were all torn and jagged so I used a lighter to burn the edges of the silhouette. You must make sure the edges are put out quickly or else it will burn too much and you'll lose the details in the figure. I am going to make the painting look like water in which the girl is standing chest deep in. I want to go into very fine detail with the water and make it look very cool. I also might make a green meadow in it to add a different range in color to the background. I also traced the outline of the girl so I can play with it in different medias in the future.

Abstract Painting

Abstract Painting

I kind of laid off of art for a couple weeks since I had done a lot of pieces the last couple of weeks. When I came back to it I decided to start doing some abstract pieces like the one below. This time I decided to use a wood board canvas instead of a traditional canvas. I started by staining the wood board yellow by thinning out yellow acrylic paint with lots of water. After that dried I used acrylic modeling paste and made some shapes and figures out of it. After that dried (about a day later) I thinned out a decent amount of purple paint with water and pored it along the top of the canvas. I then stood the canvas upright and let it seep down. After that dried I flipped the canvas and did the same thing with green paint on the other side. At this point I was running out of ideas so I did the same thing with blue paint in the middle except I constantly rotated the canvas so it could drip both ways. After that dried I poured small puddles of black ink and used a straw to blow it around the canvas. I did this about five or six times. After that dried I used different sized chisels to carve out parts of the wood board. I then used a finer tipped chisel to make small carvings within the black ink. This is intended to be a mixed media piece but I went very abstract with it. I enjoyed doing it and how relaxed it was. 

Day 6: Final Day Of Oil Paint

Day 6: Today I finished up the nebula oil painting by adding the finishing touches to the piece. This included a final layer of light paint and the stars. For the stars I just dipped the back side of the paint brush into the paint and randomly applied dots wherever I found them necessary. sometimes I would also do light and dark red stars and some light blue ones as well so it wouldn't be boring and all white. I also added one defined star in the middle of the nebula. I did this by adding a larger dot and then dragging it out all four directions to give it a flare look. I also added a lot of small dots on the left side of the nebula to make it look like there is a hole through it and to show how endless space really is. I enjoyed playing around with this piece and I now enjoy more abstract art now, which is probably what my next piece is going to be. I didn't really like how the piece looked until I added the stars which shows that even the smallest addition can really change the whole piece.

Final Piece

Previous Day (Day 5)

Oil Painting Day 5

Day 5: On day five I continued to paint the lines I did on the right side of the nebula. I believe that this adds a range of depth to the piece and makes it look more creative. I used many different colors for the lines to make the color behind the lines more noticeable. After that, I waited for the paint to dry and added a thin cloudy layer of paint over the lines. I think that the piece is coming along well. The most important thing that Ive learned from using oil paint is to always have a rag on you. You first apply paint it is easily manipulated and if you don't like how something looks it makes it easy to change it up. Paint thinner is also very important. Oil paint is much thicker then acrylic paint so to get a thin cloudy paint you will need to use a decent amount of thinner.

Day 5

Previous Day (Day 4)