Category: Assignment 2

In reconsidering how to do the creating part of this assignment, I realised I didn’t want to feel constrained by overly narrow thinking. Maybe the dichotomy I had presented to either do the assignment traditionally or digitally was a bit limiting. I decided to paint my references in watercolour and see where the next step of the process took me, whether that involved creating a finished piece, incorporating some digital manipulation, or simply using my paintings as another form of visual reference for my final displays.

I started my paintings and was pleasantly surprised with the results, I particular like how the strawberries came out.

Next I tried to do a digital painting. It didn’t go well. Actually I expected the watercolours to be a failed experiment and to fall back on digital work, but the inverse turned out to be true. After a certain point I gave up rendering and realised these pieces weren’t going to suddenly start looking amazing and overtake my watercolour paintings. Here’s my abandoned digital creations for posterity.

At this point, I really liked how the strawberries came out, but was a little disappointed with the squash in comparison. In reading back over the assignment text I was struck by one part where it says that poor colour choices can lead to food looking unappetising. I felt a bit silly, thinking about a butternut squash and what makes it visually appealing, and it certainly isn’t the bumpy, beige outer skin. I cut the squash open to reveal the bright orange inside and tried painting it again. I’m much happier with this rendition. Ultimately I still think the strawberries turned out better, but I’m glad I took the time to study what went wrong with the squash and have another go at it.

Happy enough with the results, I scanned in my two paintings and got to work on adding a textual element.

One thing I wanted to do now that I had my images on my computer was desaturate them and look at them as black and white images. This showed interesting results and made it very clear why the strawberries are a more successful painting. I tried to do some photo correction to make the pictures more appealing, and will certainly repeat this experiment in the future to check for effective contrast and value choices in my artwork.

 

After doing some minor adjustments I started adding text. I know that changing fonts mid sentence is considered a faux-pas, but I thought it looked good, so I kept it. I tried to arrange the text in as pleasing a way as possible. Feeling that the visual impact was a little basic, I locked the text layer and painted over it with little lightening strokes, trying to give it a kind of metallic, embossed look, really pursuing that “quality” angle.

Here are the final pieces:

In reflecting on this assignment, I definitely feel like I’ve already made good progress as a visual artist since starting the course. Beforehand I probably would have just gone straight to the drawing with this assignment, but I think having the tools to approach a brief in a more deliberate way is very valuable and produces better work. I’m quite happy with the final pieces, creating something that is quite far away from what my original vision was, but allowing the creative process to bring me in a different unexpected direction.

Going into this assignment I tried to latch onto the ideas of consolidating the skills learned so far in this course. I wanted to incorporate several of the techniques dealt with in the previous exercises. I made a list of the tools I wanted to utilize:

• Making a spider diagram
• Doing research
• Drawing from observation
• Making colouristic and textural decisions
• Using black and white/contrast

I’m going to go back to this list several times as I progress with my drawing.

To set things off, I did a spider diagram.

In evoking “quality” in accordance with the brief, I decided on approaching the illustration in a very painterly way. I wanted to emulate something that would be produced in a fine art atelier.

Confident in the direction I wanted to take, I took to pinterest and made a board of reference images. I really love this board, and some of the images I found I think are really fantastic, and I couldn’t think of a better way to evoke quality in doing an illustration. My inital idea was to do something that looks like an oil painting, but looking on pinterest I was more taken with working digitally or using watercolour.

https://pin.it/k3pqtsvsdl3e4u

I made some notes on how I wanted to approach the display. I weighed up the pros and cons of working traditionally or digitally. I noted the advantages of traditional painting, thinking it would make my work more expressive and naturalistic, and making it easier to draw directly from observation. However I will definitely want to do some image correction and typography on my computer, and scanning a painting will diminish the effect and quality. Doing the work digitally will allow me to play around with interesting textures, compositions and brush sets, but it won’t look as natural and it is harder to translate an observational drawing to digital. It’s also easier to print a digital creation.

I also looked at whether to do a single piece or a bundle or collection of fruits and vegetables. Noting the challenges in composition and out-of-season procurement when it comes to multiple items. I also felt that focusing on one item would evoke a feeling of quality, inspired by images like this: https://pin.it/ryzdockaxghijf

I wrote out a list of seasonal fruits and vegetables for both Summer and Autumn. For me the produce that I most associate with coming into season in Summer would be strawberries. For Autumn it would be root vegetables, or something like pumpkin or squash. One thing I really wanted to focus on for this exercise is colour theory. In approaching the assignment I was reminded of some reading I did recently on Van Gogh and his excellent and fairly radical use of complementary colours. This short article provides some good information. http://www.vangoghsstudiopractice.com/2011/05/the-effect-of-colour/

I did a little refresher on some basic colour theory, some info here: http://www.poeticmind.co.uk/research/rgb-cmyk-colour-systems/

One of my favourite Van Gogh paintings is The Night Café, https://www.vincentvangogh.org/the-night-cafe.jsp

In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote of the painting:

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

It’s a beautiful and deliberate use of colour.

In thinking about colours for my project, I thought about what colours I most associate with the respective season, and what colour works as its complement. Using the red strawberries, I wanted to utlize green in the drawing, and using an orange or earthy vegetable for Autumn, I wanted to incorporate blue. Not only do the pieces themselves utilize complementary colours, but I’m hoping that the pieces will also complement each other.

My next step was to procure the produce for my observational drawings. I made sure to keep an eye out for in store point of sale displays for any spontaneous inspiration. I went to my local fruit and veg shop and picked up the best pieces I could find for the assignment.

There were a few minor sales displays, but they had only very simple black pumpkin outlines for Halloween. I ended up buying a butternut squash for the Autumn display, and a punnet of strawberries for Summer.

At this stage I was fairly confident with moving on to the drawing section of the assignment.