This term for me has consisted mainly of doing practical work to build up for my folio at the end of the year. I found last year that I was scrambling at the end to find and finish art to put on my board and this year I want to minimise that. Another goal for this year is to take more inspiration from my artist models: Vincent Van Gogh, Marilynn Webb, Mimmo Palladino. This goal is definitely something I've achieved so far as I've make sure to include lots of their different styles/stylisations in my work.
One painting that incorporated Vincent Van Gogh's art style (heavily impressionism inspired, very visible/prominent brush strokes) is a painting I recently completed. My thought process in creating this stemmed from me sitting down and just thinking about basic concepts of mindfulness that could translate well visually in my artwork, really get my kaupapa across.
I started with this quick thumbnail sketch.
I then started painting and playing around with colours. One thing I didn't want to happen is to make the painting too dark, especially the background- I feel it makes the painting lack depth perception. I made sure to really ensure the background and parts of the painting meant to be further away were much more lighter and muted in colour. One example of how I achieved this was mixing in a tiny bit of red with the green I used on the hill to mute the colour and make it less vibrant.
Also in accordance with using Van Gogh as my primary artist model for this painting, I made sure my brushstrokes were really visible and also quite tiny, to achieve some detail I mixed slightly different hues of the same colour to create contrast especially with the grass and the schoolbag.
The finished painting I'm actually really proud of. It definitely has the Van Gogh element I was hoping for, it's generally very pretty and it includes lots of different painting methods/techniques that will help me as I progress through painting more for my folio.
One part I'm especially proud of is using a sort of dark blue-green colour underneath where the tree was: this originally started as just figuring out where I wanted the tree and branches to be placed. But it ended out well as the brown I used had a reddish undertone and so the two cancelled out to create a dark, rich sort of brown to act really well as the shadowed portion, it also made the paint more opaque than it would've straight on the paper.
