I’m still trying to get used to blogging, and I find myself thinking about it while I’m in class or out running errands, but as soon as I get on the computer I completely forget about it. Thus, no posts.

Anyway, Philip has been asking me to put some of his favorite artworks on here, so here are a few. I did a painting series for my Painting Fundamentals class last semester. We could choose our own still-life to paint, and I chose an adorable purple glass pitcher that my Mom bought for me in Williamsburg (I think). Each of the paintings had specific criteria. The first painting was an Alla Prima, interpreted to mean “At the first.” This means that you sit down for your three hours of class and pump out a painting. After your three hours, your done. This helps you learn to make decisions quickly, learn to work with wet paint, and just learn to paint quickly. Here is my alla prima:

I had never painted glass before, it was a lot harder than I expected. I figured that if you thinned out the paint to make it transparent, it would look like glass! Right? Wrong. Well, it took me a while to learn that wasn’t the case, but I finally sort of figured it out. I justified a poorly done painting by saying I only had 3 hours to do it.
The next painting was of the same still-life, but this time we had to do multiple layers. We started out by doing an underpainting, just blocking out the colors and shapes and figuring out shadows, etc. Then later, after it’s dry, we come and do another layer and do more details. Then we let it dry and come back to do the final touches. Now I had no excuses if it looked bad, because I spent a lot of time on this one. And actually I feel like this one turned out quite a bit better.

The last painting of the series had to be influenced by a contemporary painter, so my teacher went through a list of painters we could choose from. She showed us their works and then we could choose whichever one we wanted. I chose to copy the style of Stephen Conroy. Several things interested me about his work. He does a lot of figures, but he is well known for black borders around his canvases. Also, although his figures are always very realistic, he does loose and chunky shadows behind them. These are the two elements that I copied. Here’s mine, and his.