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Continuing the Artist Study assignment, our second and last paint was to paint any subject we wanted to while still referencing the same artist we chose for our self-portrait. Now Matt Hughe has a style he calls Dark Romanticism. This is based on the Romanticism style of painting, which is usually a dark background with the main subject in very lighter colors. Now Hughes takes a more dark approach to this style, usually with a darker subject matter.

Now for this painting, I actually had to restart because the first idea I had was a more landscape subject but after doing the under-painting and starting the color blocking I couldn’t keep painting. So I changed course and decided to do another skeleton subject as I really like painting bones. I felt a lot better about this piece. The flowers gave me a bit of trouble, but I decided to make make it a bit more abstract and they turned out really well.

For this assignment, we were tasked with doing a style study of an artist and doing a self-portrait in their style. I chose to look at Matt Hughes. Now Hughes’s style is very based on the art nouveau movement, especially that of artist Alphonse Mucha. Now Hughes created his own version and refers to it as Gothic Art Nouveau. I have always loved this style of art but this is very much more illustration-based style rather than painting so there was very much that challenge of trying to achieve the same effect with a different medium. For my main reference photo, I used this card from the Tarot deck that Matt Hughes created.

I decided to do an underpainting in a warmer tone to be able to build the skin tone. This painting was very hard for me to do, mostly because trying to match the skin tone and also create a more illustrative style with paint was difficult. I am proud of what I created, but I know that if there was more time I could have added more details.

For this assignment, the goal was to paint a still life image while focusing on both the color scheme and the overall technique of the process. I decided to do mine a really cool shot of a headless skeleton sitting on the floor, with a large circle lamp lighting it from the back. Since I was going to have to use a lot of yellow in the piece, I put down a light brown wash on the canvas before blocking out the shapes. The top half of the background is more blue/purple in tone, while the bottom half is more golden and brown. The bones are greyscaled.

Over the next few weeks, I had a lot of trouble trying to not get lost in the details of the painting. I wanted to create a more realistic painting, but with the number of details in the reference photo alone, there simply wasn’t enough time to do that. So I went with more of a surrealist type of vibe. Played around with the colors, excrated some of the tones in places, and tried to follow the rule of thirds in a way with the three different focus/color tones.

Overall, I am very happy with how the finished pieced worked out. I had to just accept that I won’t be able to do what I had first set out to do, and then figure out what I could do to make what I had into a finished piece.

For the first assignment for this semester, we had to do four different color pallets of a still life. The four pallets that I chose were grayscale/black and white, red and green, violet analogous, and violet and yellow.

The one I feel the best about is my violet analogous one, as it was really nice to try and get different shades and tones of violet. The one I feel the least about is the last one I did, which was the yellow and violet complementary pallet. I had trouble building layers with the yellow and my sketch lines are still visible under the yellow. I also had issues overall with the edges of different colors cause there wasn’t an underlayer to help blend the edges together better. 

There was a bit of a learning curve when working with the acrylics as I am more used to using either charcoal, ink, and watercolor material and found the acrylics a lot more difficult to use. Doing color blocking on each of the pieces really helped with getting values and base layers on the paper. Moving forward I will definitely start pieces by doing a complete underlayer and then color blocking on top of that.   

For one of our assignments this semester, we had to do a self-portrait using the grid method and also using transparency paper and a projector. The paper that we had to use was very large and while trying to crop my reference photo, I had a hard time getting the scale to work out. There are a few things I wish I should have thought of while taking my reference photo, how light/dark the background was in comparison to me. I also wished I had made my clothes darker in the final piece as well, to offset the brightness of the background. I was really worried that I would mess up the face, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible. All in all, I feel really good about the outcome of my Self-Portrait.

For our final assignment of the semester, we had to pick one subject and draw at least 30 drawings. For mine, I chose to do a study on one of the cow skulls that are ever-present. While doing the series I found this really neat purple paper that had two different textures, it took really well with ink, especially when I layered the ink. I had a really hard time getting started with this because I really didn’t have any idea of what to do. I knew I wanted to do some type of still life. At first, I made one with some flowers and rocks and other things I found, but it seemed to busy for me. I landed on the skull after talking with my professor.

I really liked playing around with the ink on the purple paper, especially with the white and blue inks. I wanted to try and do something different with every piece. I also tried to use every material in my kit as well, from charcoal to the different colors of Conte crayon, to using the ebony and graphite pencils, to sharpies and ink. my favorite piece is the last one above. I did an ink wash with some leftover ink I had after working one night, vaguely following the movement of the skull. Then using white ink and a dip pen, I went over the wash and tried to do a sketch-like effect using different cross-hatching. I really liked doing this series because I really had to think about what materials worked well together and also getting really good at drawing a cow skull from different angles.

For this project, we had to create a pair, this could be light vers dark, life vers death, etc. For this, I wanted to play with the idea of self-identity and how one views themselves. I used my own hand for this project and took a simple picture of the hand against a mirror at an angle that showed both the “real” hand and the “reflected” hand. I mostly used vine, willow, and white charcoal on the left side of the composition. Then on the right, I used ink wash, graphite pencils, and darker pencils. I tried to create a lot of detail and movement with the shawl in the reflection, but I should have tried to make some of the shadows/backgrounds a bit darker to create more contrast, and I really should have played around with and practice trying to create light glares on the right side so that it was easier to tell that that was supposed to be what was seen inside the mirror and that it wasn’t just two different hands against each other, but rather one hand but two different views.

I went through a lot of different ideas before I landed on just using hands and just changed the medium and background of the two different sides.

Our first assignment of the year was a study on Light, Line, and Space. I chose to do my assignment of a still life of two Cow skulls that was set up. At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish the piece because I hadn’t done something that big since the last semester. I used vine charcoal and charcoal pencil. I tried to create movement by rubbing the charcoal out in one direction, but I wasn’t able to create enough shadows to contrast the lighter parts of the picture. Others said that they really liked how I was able to manipulate the charcoal to create the movement, and also how I did the background. The background was done last minute with an ink wash. I tried to make sure that the ink helped with the remaining white space around the main skulls.