The setup
For this workshop we were asked to bring several miscellaneous items in to create a setup that we would use as our inspiration and reference to draw several charcoal and wet media pieces from. I chose to bring in several monochrome items, since I work best with less colour and wanted to experiment with textures and details instead of having to focus on colour. I chose to have my striped blanket as a background and decorate it with laces and different creations using string and yarn. I also decorated it with two skulls, one antelope skull and a rat skull, to give it some character. I brought in plastic vines, a net bag, a moon lamp and a flower crown to give it interesting details in terms of draping. I had a lot of toilet paper rolls laying around that I had collected out of habit, since my sisters loved to craft with them back home.
I wanted a lot to happen in my setup with details in fabric and draping, as well as the items I brought. Here is my final design of my setup and I was more than happy with it in the end.
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Charcoal drawings
For the charcoal drawings, we were asked to use the setup as our reference. We were also asked to use a viewfinder to capture certain parts of the setup so it would focus on certain parts of the setup, rather than the whole thing.
Here are my finished charcoal pieces for this workshop. I’m not an avid charcoal user since whenever I use traditional media I usually use acrylic paint. I’m very happy with the result of my charcoal drawings, and Gerard gave me excellent advice how to really lift some details so they wouldn’t get in the way of everything else that’s happening in the charcoal piece, keeping in mind how hues and saturation changes when it’s black and white compared to using actual colours.
I had a lot of fun creating these, I was taught how to use charcoal more properly. At the start I was really struggling and didn’t know much, but after this part of the workshop I feel like I know how to use it better, and I certainly will use it more frequently now, since I really enjoyed working with it.
My favorite out of all these three pieces is probably the first one with the rat skull. I put more time and effort into the small details and I feel like I managed to lift out the white and brighter colours better using black and white rather than the other ones. Since I worked more on the shadows in that one.
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Wet Media
For the second task we were asked to create wet media pieces using ink or other wet media to make a monochrome piece. I decided to use watercolours since I didn’t access to ink at the time.
Here is my finished wet media piece using watercolours. I had a lot of fun making this one, making the black colour more opaque, by blending it with water and layering it to get the right shade to match with the hue of the setup. I had a lot of fun doing this, it was basically like the charcoal task but with wet media! Even thought I only have one wet media piece, I’m very happy with it. We had a very limited time creating it, since I was focusing in the charcoal pieces. Where we also were asked to make atleast three, but I’m unsure how many wet pieces we were expected to do.
I felt like I managed to capture my setup very well in this picture. It’s very simple but I managed to lift the items I wanted to be focused on out.
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Acrylics
For the third task, we were asked to take pictures of the setup and print them out as photo copies to use as a reference for our acrylic pieces. It would be like using a viewfinder, but a direct reference used right next to us on the wall. Whenever we had them we were asked to paint the image using acrylics on an A2 paper.
Here are my finished acrylic pieces! I’m extremely happy with them since I used a method I’ve never really used before in terms of colouring. The paper was also very different from what I’m used to, since I usually paint on canvases and the paper we were given was blank. We used a layering technique to paint, and it always didn’t go as planed since the paper was very shiny and slippery, it sometimes happened that the colour would come right off if it didn’t dry properly. So we had to work on both of the pieces at the same time, that will say, work on one, then switch while it was drying, and continue doing that.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach my idea of monochrome but with details on this, to be frank, I didn’t think that far. But I got once again great advice on how to tackle the problem. I also got help and advice in terms on how to work in more colour into the pieces to really lift the details and make the background and background rather than one with the middle and foreground.
I ended up using all of the primary colours in both of the pieces, to really make it work, and it did. I wanted to focus with red on the bottom one, but working yellow into the highlights and blue into the background and shadows, where it needed to be darker. It really made the painting pop more and feel more three dimensional rather than two dimensional. Which is important, depending on what you’re after or expect from yourself.
Overall I had a great experience, there were several hardships in working with these, but I learnt from my mistakes and what I got stuck on, and was taught how to solve them and think outside the box from what I normally do.
My favourite of these two is the bottom one focusing on red. I only used red, white and black at first, so it was very plain and I was not happy. I was then advised to use blue as darker and more yellow in the white to create a more three dimensional look, to make it feel more alive rather than plain, and it really helped.
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Overall I had a great experience during the fine art class, I was taught a lot and used the critique to my advantage to grow and learn. Which is something I thrive to do. To learn how to use colour more and how to translate colour into grey scale, to make a charcoal painting seen like it just have a black and white filter on.