Process: Watercolor 21st Century Still Life

For my second watercolor class our first assignment was to do a 21st Century still life. Idea:

“Getting inspiration from the objects & materials you have brought to class, consider what type of 21st Century environment, context, or setting supports your 21st century idea. You may choose to be quite personal with your idea or deal with a contemporary and current issue using still life as a vehicle.”

We had the option to do part of it in collage as well. As what usually happens with me in the first few weeks of class, I had no idea what to do and had a hard time coming up with ideas. I thought of old computers and electronic equipment at the thrift store and thought that might be a neat idea to incorporate that, but I didn’t want to actually buy any of that stuff. Coming up with a theme was difficult, because I didn’t want to do the typical still life with fruit and a laptop and cell phone.

Eventually I came up with the idea of how technology changes. My parents own a player piano- the kind that takes rolls of paper with punctured holes cut out for each note. These pianos are now an obsolete form of technology just like the cell phones and laptops we discard every few years when they become outdated. I thought that the rolls of paper would be a great collage background and then I would combine that with amalgamated balls of tech devices like laptops and cell phones.

After more planning I refined the idea a bit. I decided that instead of doing a static still life, I would combine that with amalgamated balls of tech devices like laptops and cell phones and then use those in a repeated pattern all across the paper (I love patterns!) I ditched the idea of the collage background because not only would it be a lot of work, but if I had a busy pattern then it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a distracting collage in the background. I decided to have clusters of piano keys with cell phones and laptops.

I began to sketch everything out. I do apologize for the darkness of the photos but it’s hard to capture 5H pencil at night.

I then went on to coloring when that was finished. This project took me a very long time to do, mostly because I am so exacting. For angular designs like this, flat brushes work great. The paper is 300lb cold press, I think. It’s very heavy and resists curling.

At the end, I was left with a great pattern, but also a white background. I decided to fill the background with a soft blue, leaving white edges around the clusters. This emphasizes the clusters but keeps the background calm. All in all, it turned out great and I would love to recreate a digital version of this pattern!

Process - Study for Limerance

In my color class I was given the assignment to create a piece of art using only one or two colors based off of a photo of some kind. I won’t go into what my color class entailed, but let’s just say this wasn’t the kind of assignment I expected to do in a color class. (Whatever happened to doing serious color charts people?) Anyway, I decided to go with a scene from Giorgio Moroder’s version of the movie Metropolis. There’s one scene in the movie where the female villain (Hel) is dancing in front of an audience of men. Here is the image:

By the way if you haven’t seen Metropolis, PLEASE go do yourself a favor and watch it. It is definitely in my top 3 favorite movie list. So I really liked the vibrant color in the still and thought that using black paint and alizarin crimson would do the trick in replicating it to some degree. I thought that doing an oil painting would be a good idea, especially since there was a show coming up and I figured I could kill 2 birds with one stone and submit my piece to the show when I finished.

I had this idea floating around in my head for a while of a woman coming out of the background with a sort of floral arrangement all around her and I decided that I would try to explore that idea with this assignment, hence this being a study for perhaps a future drawing. Continuing to look for more inspirations, I also decided to use Ingres’ The Vow of Louis xiii, also pictured below:

I decided that I wanted the main figure to be strong and dominant. In the movie, Hel is somewhat like Kali, a bringer of destruction aimed at destroying mankind and society. I decided I would incorporate that idea as well as making her appear over a dead body in symbolism of that. In this picture, the young Christ child would no longer be salvation but doom. Now unfortunately I don’t know of any men who would be willing to pose for me in the nude as a dead man (haha!) But that was okay, because I remembered that I could gain inspiration from the dead men scattered in the painting The Raft of the Medusa. (Let me tell you kids, art history really does help you!) I hoped that there was at least one sketch of the dead man almost falling off the raft and to my luck that was the only preliminary drawing I could find of the painting! (That pic is a few down.)

There’s nothing wrong about letting the old masters help you!

So now it came down to combining everything. I slowly worked on the drawing in-class but never finished the whole thing. Although I understand the idea of wanting students to stay in a studio class and work for 3 hours- I get stuff done so much faster at home. Plus I don’t always feel comfortable with others watching me work. After I had done about half the sketch I started transferring it to the canvas just by eye. I had prepared a thick amount of gesso and applied it with a roller so it was extra smooth and good for drawing on. I used a charcoal pencil (don’t use pencil under oil paint, in time it will show through) and then afterwards I sprayfixed the charcoal so that it wouldn’t rub away or into my paint.
So here is my preliminary sketching on the right and canvas on the left. Sorry for the blurry pic:

For some parts like the dead man, I drew on the paper still just to make sure it looked good before I did it on the canvas. I changed various parts of him so that he would fit in with my picture better.

And all done! On to the painting.

I had about 2 weeks to do this painting along with work for all my other classes. I rushed through it, staying up until 3 or 4am some nights. I made a lot of mistakes, but I was really aiming to get it done by the deadline. The hardest part was finishing it before the paint dried. I would blend the top layers into the background and if the background dried then I was rather out of luck. I went section by section…

Do you like my taboret? Haha! I have a new one now, no need to use that car cover box anymore.

Towards the end I ran out of time and literally threw paint on to the left side of the canvas.

That's it!

And ta-da! The completed picture. Sadly I didn’t get my painting into the show, probably because the paint was still wet when I submitted it and they said that wet paint was not allowed. (You still have to try, right?) But it went into another show this past semester, so all was not lost! I really enjoy it even though I wish I hadn’t needed to do a rush job. Finis!