LO1 – Identifying your own strengths and develop areas for personal growth
LO6 – Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
Since the last post, I have completed 2 portraits. One for Zain, and another one for Yousaf.
In the first session of painting my very first portrait, I found my experience to be a mix of frustration and amusement. I expected myself to be able to capture Zain well in the first session, knowing my experience with acrylic, however, not only did I found it hard to blend, but also to capture the skin tone right. As I try to dab my colours onto the canvas, I found that I had to brush up (get it? brush) on my painting skills with acrylic as incidents such as diluting too much of the paint with water, mixing unevenly the colours etc.
So it was quite delightful to find that I still have lots of room for improvement in painting portraits, which replaced my goal of learning how to draw portraits. Though I guess it made sense because I put myself in the impression that if I was able to paint still lifes, then I should be paint portraits, even though they were two different things and I didn’t think the same way as for drawing.
Though the frustrating part was when I still ended up with his skin on the brown shade rather than the orangey shade the reference photo had, despite pushing myself to paint over his entirety around 4 times throughout the whole process before I thought that I should cut short, wanting to meet Mr McGrath’s expectations of finishing 3 paintings by December.
Painting the shirt and the background was quite a learning as I have come to learn the existence of pretty useful paint tools that I have never seen. In my third session, I painted the shirt and a small part of the background. During this session, Mr McGrath noted that my colours were not only too similar but also too cold. So he introduced the existence of an acrylic gloss, which makes an acrylic become semi-translucent to add a coloured layer, basically watercolour. This helped save a lot of time as that meant that I didn’t need to repaint the entire shirt! (The good and bad of acrylic) Another tool that I learned of was a painter’s tape. The painter’s tape is basically like masking tape, and it’s used to block out sections so that there will be a clean paint line. Though similar to masking tape (which I have tried before and the results were not fabulous), the painter’s tape gives a medium level of adhesion, which will allow itself to be removed cleanly after the job is done up.
For the background, I was pretty satisfied with it when I finally finished the portrait. However, looking back, I wished that I had used a thin brush to possibly add some clothing texture to the background in order to relate it to the stitchwork Ralli, which means mixing and connected, in order to further build a better connections that crosses boundaries between him and I.
Finishing the first painting gave me a lot of confidence in my painting skills, seeing that I was ahead of others. However, with just 3 sessions left (2 for me since I had to miss a class due to piano exams, though I made it up by going afterschool), I was assigned an uncompleted drawing of Yousaf.
I immediately started working on the face. I had to paint this time with thicker coats of paints due to the dark pencil outline of the portrait. Though I tried to paint to match Yousaf’s skin tone, it ended up in a shade of brown again, Except it was worse this time, as it wasn’t similar to the photograph at all.
At that moment, I decided to step back and observe how my friend Shangyu paints her portrait. I realized that despite our extremely different painting styles, because she uses orange paint (name forgotten…) along with burnt sienna to create her realistic skin colour.
After that breakthrough, I was more confident with the painting of the portrait as I move on to the painting of the shirt. Because I chose the shirt to be yellow in hopes that it will be in contrast with the blue background (Yousaf’s favourite colour), the paint is more translucent, which would mean I would need to paint multiple of layers in order to cover up the outline of the drawing below. In order to finish the portrait against the time, I decided to use more opaque colours when painting on the outline and blend it out further with the bright yellow.
For the background, I kept it blue, albeit with rough shades of blue as I used thick paint to mix them unevenly and colour it on to the canvas. I decided to have ocean motifs painted all over the background in hopes of making it more fun and bright.
