fishes and knitted things

Fishes: These koi were inspired by a park we went to in China called Peach Tree Island Park. There was a giant pond and a bridge where you could feed all of these swarming koi. It was quite neat. I had this picture that was just full of brilliant color that I knew I wanted to use as inspiration. The technique? Paint, sand off, build it back up, sand off more if you choose. A lot of us had a hard time sanding off the painting we had just spent hours doing but it gives it quite a look. And as a treat you get an art term for the day, when you have everything out of focus, and kind of blurry around and then a center point of focus that is in detail is called a vignette, as done in the fish picture.

knitted hat: I was super stoked to do this painting. Megan had taken this picture of herself to show off her newly knitted saggy hat and I just had to paint it. I have never done a human in a painting before and it's one of the most challenging subjects (especially without taking head drawing which I haven't). But I just loved the picture a lot and so did my teacher (he has to pre-approve our photo reference). It's supposed to be our own picture but I was running out of China ones that I felt I could do cool paintings of...and I figured my sister is close enough to me, so I hope you don't mind that I took your picture, but I think it makes up for it that it's a picture of you. I've always felt Megan is the prettier sister and so it was really fun to capture her beautiful profile into a painting. And it's an ode to her amazing knitting skills which really is impressive.

The technique for this one was called photo copy mount down. You take a photo-copy of your picture, or line drawing (i did a line drawing of this). Then you use matt-medium or gloss-medium to mount it to the board and put another one or two layers of it on top and it's ready to paint on. We also used wet and dry sand paper to give it a neat texture, it's hard to tell from the picture but it really turned out neat.

enjoy.