Composition project – assignment 1
After an intense day of (awesome) presentations by George Pratt (about 5 hours worth) I spent last night doing refining the composition of my thumbnail and then tweaking colours. I was originally working with cool colours but John English’s very apt critique was that he’d like to see a warm palette which really accentuates the heat. It needs to look like this guy is out in the burning sun. I didn’t even think to take that approach! Brilliant! And after another round of critiques and some live colour tweaks this morning here’s where I ended up:
Most of the day was then spent doing a gouache painting, with only a little time lost trying to get the laser printer to print my linework on tracing paper. After about 5 attempts to pioneer a new method of linework to canvas progression (I would’ve projected the tracing paper printout instead of tracing the whole thing then projecting) I gave up on it. However, I did manage to coerce it to print straight onto watercolour paper! Even better! That’s the kind of efficiency that makes me want punch through a wall and be like, “YEAAA!” But in actuality if I tried to pull a stunt like that the wall would probably punch through me, and thus I must stick to minor feats like skipping the tracing paper phase. Anyway, due to this my project was no longer going to be on illustration board.
I learnt a fair amount about colour mixing in this assignment. I’ve never really tried to precisely mix certain colours, and given that the photo above is a bit inaccurate (little digital camera) I think it turned out pretty close to the plan. At least I’m pleased with it!
Also, along the way I was reminded that gouache dries darker than it looks when wet so my hot tip to you is to test it on paper before applying.
All in all it was a good exercise in composition, and really forced us to simplify an image. It makes me think I was actually onto something with my more minimal paintings, like this one.
