Process Work:
My painting includes four features that are significant to my life in different aspects. A mango to represent my favorite fruit along with my birthplace, Mexico and all of the mangos I have eaten growing up connecting to special moments here. A black bear stuffed animal to showcase my childhood stuffed animals and all of the adventures we’ve gone on, along with reminding me of my father as black bears are his favourite. A ladybug, reminding me of a special day in Nova Scotia by my family’s cottage. And finally a weeping willow tree significant to all of the summer days I have spent under a specific one outside of my best friend’s house running around, suntanning, writing poetry, reading and drawing. This painting was a big challenge for me in using a big canvas which is new to me, exploring all that we have practiced so far including creating and using chroma colours, shading and shadows, using a proper background and most of all finding a style that felt most comfortable to me. I would like to branch out and try different styles but I feel like basic, more realism centered painting is all I am used to and have tried so my painting aimed at using different brush strokes and added style with layering as well as colour layering but ultimately fell into this more basic style in the end. I would also try using an even lighter background base to start to leave more opportunity when using a cover hue as I ended up quite liking the original colour I had and didn’t want to add anything darker but also didn’t want to wash out the mango. I learned a lot about colour mixing and shading using the practice sheets for reference to build shades or check complementary hues within an actual painting. I also learned how to position objects on a larger scale along with considering layering objects using paint. This was overall a tremendously eye opening learning experience in clearly many paint executionary ways. It took a lot of time, reworking, and reevaluating at different stages to effectively put all of these practices to work in a full painting but in the end this felt very fulfilling and hopefully this is evident in the finished product. I liked trying out still-life painting and learning more about this genre while also stretching it with my tree inclusion into more of a hybrid style or trompe l’oeil as I have come to learn as the upclose study starts to turn into a landscape with a living element. I felt like this helped me fill the space in the way I wanted and make the piece more my own in terms of style, exploration and layering techniques which made the artwork a success.
Value Exercise:
Process Work
Final Still-Life
