Laughing WomanThis quarter I have been working on the Laughing Woman, she is a woman standing in the desert laughing with her arms turning into cacti and a metal heart nailed to her chest. I haven’t been consistently painting this one because I didn’t feel like I had enough skill to paint her skin. I started working on her more recently, last week specifically with a wave of inspiration that hit me like a train. I have been using pictures of the El Paso mountains to help me with painting the background and as I was painting I noticed that the mountains that are further away from the woman are a lot more blue and gray than I guess I wanted which threw me off. The look I am going for in this painting is vibrant so when I saw that the colors of the mountains were duller than I wanted I had to rethink of how to structure the painting. The woman's skin in the vision I had was caramel/yellow and when I painted it I made it more red/orange. This is what I was afraid of, making the color slightly different from what I saw if I add a tiny bit more red or yellow ochre. One day recently I sent pictures to my Mom while we were on the phone and I asked her if she had any suggestions on what to do next, she responded by saying it looks good and it looks like my Nana Gloria which is good and kind of what I am going for, I wanted this painting to reflect where I came from.
Gem-headI have been figuring out how to paint crystals, it is the one thing that has postponed work on the Skull painting. I have been having trouble with painting the longer quartz-like crystals because of the way they refract light and because they are transparent this quarter I have been building up my skills in order to paint the crystals in the skull correctly. A while back I met with my painting mentor Meg where she told me that a good way to solve this problem is to practice creating crystal with other materials such as colored pencils. That next week I started creating white crystals on a black sheet of paper in order to get as close as I could to the elements on the painting (the crystals in the skull are blue I just made them white on the piece of paper in order to make the light simpler). I started by making the crystal structure first, I made all the faces distinctly than thought about where the light would travel and highlighted those regions.
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Semester 1 truths and most significant things I have learnedThis Semester I have been painting 5 different paintings. I think I have learned some valuable skills and truths of painting this semester:
Eyes Over one of the weekends, I went up to Maine to see a play my friend Rina was a part of at her university. I remember on the way back the sky was a fascinating array of magenta, yellow, orange and white, which complimented the pines in the forest around the endless highway we were on. There it was, another vision, this time I was different than the past pictures I’ve seen with proportions much more out of whack than any other painting I had made before. Its eyes were huge with a warm dark blue in the shadows and a brighter blue on the bottom half of the iris, it’s lips and nose were both out of proportion as well barely leaving any room for cheeks. The colors on the painting were also new to me, honestly, this painting reminded me of an acid trip because of the disproportionality and the vivid array of colors. I have painted most of this, there are a few details that I will go back and fill out. At first I was hesitant to painting this or event telling anybody about this I just thought I was going crazy but I think it is important to expand my style and one of my goals this year is to paint the visions that come to me and be sincere about the process of creating and not discriminate against my own artwork because it looks a little different from the rest.
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Seamus
A while ago someone asked me to do a commission for them of Seamus and I’m not going to say no to that because losing someone is hard and however I can help I will. I started sketching him out halfway through the last quarter trying to get all of his facial features as close as possible without using a grid. I didn't work on the painting for a while truthfully because I was scared I was going to mess it up, I have never made a painting of a specific person where you need to make everything on their face look like it is their facial feature. This painting was a good opportunity to work with skin tones, expression and light, I didn’t want anything about this painting to seem negative I wanted this to be a celebration of life instead of a mourning so I stuck to warmer colors and had him looking at the sunrise over rolling green hills.