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My reference of this painting was a photo I took while in Hawaii of the Byodo-In Temple. However, I used a different color palette for the temple and more vibrant greens to bring the scene more life and emotion. I watched many tutorials on YouTube for how to paint foliage, which I think I did a decent job on and are the highlights of this painting. The hardest part of the painting was the temple, particularly the details. I underestimated the size and had to be careful with the brush and understand foreground and background. In the back, I tried to replicate the fogginess of mountain peaks, but I painted too many trees which may have overshadowed the mountains. Overall, this painting helped me develop a greater understanding of foreground, background, shadows, colors, and perspective.

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I chose to paint a hamster because I love hamsters. This one was particularly cute because of the hearts. Although painting the colored fur was particularly easy because it was easy to obtain the pigment through skin tone practices in the past, I had trouble with the white fur of the hamster. Ultimately, I diluted a a pale skin color and lightly painted, which resulted in a nice, near transparent tint for white fur. The proportions were easy to draw out and paint because I had a reference photo.

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I really enjoyed this assignment because it showed me the importance of trusting the process. After adding the shadows and small details to the features, the art looked really realistic. I didn’t know I was capable of making such realism with paint, especially because this class was my first time working with acrylic. I particularly enjoyed painting the ear because I did really well with analyzing the shadows on the image and creating different shades of shadows to match. I also think it was a good idea to do two different angles of the eye, which seemed to convey different emotions.

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I chose this picture of me to paint because it was taken by my best friend of five years, and I like to imagine the cheerful and happy nature of the imagine invoked by the pose the expression is how she perceives me. The most troubling part of this painting was the skin tone and color matching. I tend to make less paint than I need, which calls for color matching to the original color. I also had trouble with the shadows of my face because any darker shade I used looked awkward and displaced, so instead I made a color that was little darker than the skin tone and diluted it with water to create a shadow with glaze. I also highlighted the hair to show to movement of the hair, although I may have gone overboard with it. I chose to do a cloudy blue sky black ground to match the carefree mood of the painting. In the end, I realized the proportions of my face were a little off. I made my face wider because of the big smile, but I had made my smile too small. The shoulders were also too high. However, I am still happy with the painting because it does bear a realistic similarity with the image I chose and reflects my personality, which was the goal I was hoping to achieve.

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While doing this chart, my familiarity with colors and the craft of colors grew. I noticed that I felt much more ease when building colors in all my works after this practice. I also used my understanding of blue/green to match realistic skin tones that I perceive as cool or warm. In the same way, I utilized also red and yellow to create warmer or cooler tones. This practice helped me understand the vibrancy and multitude of colors in our skins. The small lesson of glazing at the end also helped me realize how much I needed to dilute the paints to reach a transparent effect.

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Landscape Using Atmospheric or Linear Perspective

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Landscape Using Atmospheric or Linear Perspective

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Although it’s hard to tell because I didn’t succeed at making the galaxy transparent, I illustrated a plaza with a horizon and vanishing point to create depth and perspective. After I finished, I felt that the landscape was too dull and plain and decided to add a black hole where the vanishing point was and tried to depict the sucking of a black hole through colors and brush strokes. As I was painting, I could feel that I had improved in creating shadows and depth in objects through darker shades. It isn’t visible because the galaxy colors are pigmented, but there is a hallway behind the black hole that is distorted.

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I made many different drafts working with cubes, but I noticed that I have a hard time with shadows. For the final draft, I had to use online references with buildings and cubes to experiment with. Because it was my first time working with perspective and 3D objects in painting, I learned a lot from this practice, such as obtaining realistic shadow and light shades by mixing the right amount of black and white to the base color. I had a particularly hard time with determining the outline of the shadows.

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As this was my first time painting still life, I opted to using geometrically simpler objects in positions that looked pleasing to my eye. One thing I noticed from Morandi’s paintings was the serene moods and muted colors. I tried to convey the same notes in my painting by using neutral colors and avoiding too much vibrancy. For example, I mixed grays with all my paints except the peach, which ended up turning out nice as the peach adds a pop of color against the muted tones. Unfortunately, I had trouble making the shadows as I noticed that my shadow shades were too light and unnoticeable.

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I used coral, light blue, and a mint green for my three colors and a thick, slightly flat brush. Seeing as the lightest shades were blue and green, I wanted to make them the background to make the coral pop even more. In the beginning, I played with the brush to see what strokes and shapes I can make. After taking a few more looks at the finished product, I thought the work looked like flowers caught up in a storm or flowers raining from the sky, which is interesting because I had no aim or image in my head while painting. Perspective and imagination can take form from abstraction and a seemingly formless painting.

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As my first time painting with acrylic, I found the smoothness of the strokes and paint beautiful. I chose a forest green as my base color and added white and black to create nine different varieties of green shades. I opted for curvier lines with abstract symmetry. The green shades remind me of mint, emerald, jade, and forest. I’m happy overall with how each shade turned out, and it was in my aim to make an abstract painting reminiscent of nature’s greens.