Art 5 Summer Assignment

Context:

Before starting this work, I needed to determine what would be ambitious about this project. I decided increasing the size of my working area and including various techniques I'm not too familiar with, would be sufficient and challenging. I opted for a canvas that's 24 inches by 30 inches, being much larger than anything I've painted on before, and to paint something impressionistic, with much looser brushwork.

June:

Before I began this piece I had a difficult time figuring out what's the reason behind it. I already had an idea for a cool composition, but why does it matter? Before I found the answer I decided to first put something on the canvas.

By the end of June I already had a solid start. I began setting the tone of the work and covered the entire canvas in paint.

July:

I continued to work on the water, and leaned into the more apparent brushwork to emphasize a potential idea I wanted to convey. While I really liked the way the water looked, I realized an issue.

Whenever I made the image monochromatic, it became difficult to distinguish the values. To fix this, I repainted a lot of the water, and most of the pier. In this process though I lost some of the interesting texture on the water.

August:

I took a bit of a break in early August to rethink what needs to be repainted in the piece. I decided a lot needed to be redone, so I began with the shoreline, although I may have liked it more before.

By this point I needed to add what made the piece more coherent, which was the lights and reflections. Being my first time painting lights like this, it was fairly difficult. In the end with some finishing touches, I fixed my monochromatic issue with the values, and had created a piece I'm fairly proud of.