Workshop//Painting

In this weeks workshop I worked over the original figure that I started last week, but in stronger colours, with stronger emphasis on the textures and effects made by the paint. I concentrated more on mixing the right colours that will show through on the final piece, and thought a lot about which colours worked best together. I also worked a lot with which textures I could make out of the oil paint and which ones would work best on which parts of the painting. Last week was about simply marking out the figure with colours as guidelines, but this week was much more about conscious decision making.

Workshop//Painting

This week in my painting workshop I started on my large scale oil painting on canvas. It was a challenge, but I feel like it was successful as a starting point and will help me to achieve an interesting final piece.

I started off by marking out the basic shape of the figure and the background in a yellowy colour,
and then started blocking in the background.

After I had blocked in the background colour, I added the starting colours of the figure.
These aren't exactly the colours I wanted to achieve as we only had a limited range of colours, so
I will be working over/with these. 

Workshop//Painting

In our second painting workshop last week, we took the collages and paintings on top of magazine pages we had made in the first week, and cut them up to create new images. We then created paintings based on the new images we made, using simple watercolour paint colours.

The next stage of the workshop will be creating large scale oil paintings based on the paintings from last week. Dale has provided us with 5 foot canvases, which we primed and prepared this week, ready to start on next week. I have never worked as large scale as this, or painted anything like this before, but I am excited to experiment, especially with oil paints.

Workshop//Painting

Today saw the start of our third workshop series. After my assessment earlier this month, it was suggested to me to take part in the Figurative Painting workshop run by Dale Holmes. This was because my assessment tutors thought I should branch out and explore different ways of painting and expand my knowledge of the subject.

During the first workshop, we discussed the importance of contemporary and figurative painters in the art world today, and discussed how 'good' paintings are made. Throughout the workshop series we will be learning about techniques and components that make a successful figurative painting, and creating paintings of our own. As a starter activity we made collages from magazine cut-outs, layering up backgrounds, foregrounds and figures to explore how paintings are put together. We then used paint to work onto magazine pages to break down the simple shapes used within an image, to think about how shapes are used to create a painting.