Final Still-Life Painting

Purpose:
To communicate all of your knowledge about color and painting techniques to create a final, more complex, still-life painting (than your smaller still-life studies);

• To use your knowledge about composition and placement to arrange your fruit and/or vegetable to create a strong composition.

Responses:
I said that I wanted to work with yellows, reds, oranges, and browns. I used a blue/purple/green background, but besides that most of the colors I used were the ones I wanted to practice with such as in the starfish, the seashell, the wood, and the blocks. I also wanted to use a textured background which I got by mixing paints on the canvas I was using, while painting it.
 I felt like the background was the easiest part, I just layered on paint then mixed. It was a time to let the part of me that likes abstract peek through in my painting. I also learned how to mix colors much better. One of my challenges was shadows. I overcame my inability to make the shadows seem right by just trying something and going with it until it looked decent then going back and glossing over it.

Perspective Strategies

1. Linear perspective is the organization of shapes in space using straight lines to create an idea of an object's size and 3D shape.

2. Aerial perspective is the organization of the atmospheric effects on tones and colours and the way colors change depending on their distance from the eye.

3A, Horizon Line: It is a point of reference used to judge the scale and distance of objects in relation to us. In perspective drawing, the horizon happens to be the viewer's eye-level. In art, the term 'eye level', is used rather than 'horizon' because in many pictures, the horizon is hidden by walls, buildings, trees, hills etc.

3B, Vanishing Point: The point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge.

3C, Orthogonal Lines: Lines pointing to the vanishing point. The lines are parallel to the ground plane and move back from the picture plane and they set the varying heights or widths of a rectangular plane and always appear to meet at a vanishing point on the eye level.

3D, Transversal Lines: Lines that establish a fixed height or width between two orthogonal lines, and lines that form the nearest and furthest edges of a rectangle as it recedes from view.

Still-Life Studies

When I start my final still-life I want to remember to start with the background and slowly layer on paints. I also want to be less cautious and remember that acrylic paints are forgiving. I can make a mistake and fix it by layering more paint on. The orange scheme worked better for me than the blues, so I want to work with yellows, reds, oranges, and browns. The only thing about that is that I have a hard time creating a shade for orange, but that will be a good thing to learn. I also want to use a slightly textured background of one color, or one color and different shades of it.