I started this exercise at a point where I had begun to exhaust myself with regard to my prime medium and base – ink and paper. The feeling of using it had gotten so repetitive that I started to wonder whether it was time to try something new or at least something different. I was still quite reluctant at the beginning of it, but I started by scouring through my old exercise work to see if I could find something interesting to rework in a new medium. This was unexpectedly tedious considering none of the work I created was, as such, conclusive, so there was no solid artwork to go by.
TEST 1
Eventually I decided I’d go with what I’d made for my first assignment, i.e., the fruit illustrations. Specifically the one of the apple.
What was going through my mind at this point was whether I should try an entirely new medium or revisit one that I’d already use, but still maintain that sense of unfamiliarity. In that respect I remembered an artist I used to follow on Instagram who would paint on wooden blocks with acrylic paint. She would make videos of her painting sessions; her method would involve composing the entire painting with nothing but clean, simple strokes from a flat brush. It was clear to me that as easy as it looked, it probably took years of practice to be able to maintain the stability with which she created those strokes.
But there was no harm in trying it out anyway, and I’d already subconsciously had my mind set on it. And so I began working on the apple.
Now, I wasn’t entirely sure of her process, I even tried to get in contact with her regarding it but the attempt was in vain. So I started how I’d normally start with my artworks: with a pencil base. I tried to keep it similar to the original, not exactly the same, to avoid making it too monotonous. Unfortunately, I should have thought a little more before I chose handmade paper as the base for the artwork. I chose it because of its thickness, assuming it wouldn’t tear easily under the pressure of “overpainting” certain strokes. But I had more of a problem with deciding where to use which tone. I began by creating a series of tones to use in the painting. Apologies for the watermark, it took me a while to figure out how to get rid of it.
And then I began painting.
As can be seen, the final image neither looks like the original, nor does it look like an apple. I started by using lighter simple tones, but even in creating those tones I was slightly unsuccessful as they turned out more dull and bland than light. As I progressed as I added smaller darker toned strokes to the mix. Somewhere around the central area, where the seeds are located, things started to get a little too close and complex. Eventually it looks like a such a disaster, I started covering it up with a very dark tone of red. And thus began to look more like an apricot than an apple. The colours, in relation to the rest of the paper, created such a large contrast too, so I began to fill up the rest of it with flatter, less complex shapes of relatively lighter tonal value to reduce the contrast but enough to retain the clarity of the “apple” as a subject.
TEST 2
Finding the next subject to recreate was even tougher because my material was either half done, simple components put together or just generally bad subjects. Eventually I settled on a couch I made for the 50s assignment. While it wouldn’t be a solid recreation (since there isn’t really much to recreate), I would still be able to test out the technique.
This time I actually worked on something closely related to wood, a board of MDF, something I was familiar with in another context but had never really painted on. I already had experience painting on an ordinary wooden board but normally the surfaces of the boards I use are too rough to paint on smoothly. To begin with, I made the pencil base as always…
…and chose pink as the overall colour scheme. Again, mapping out what goes where was really tricky this time around. I’m still unsure of how to go about it.
But unlike before I was able to paint a lot better on this one, despite not getting tones right, probably because of the MDF. This time it was a lot more spontaneously navigated, and the finished artwork looked interesting to say the least. Beyond a point the process became so complicated and a little frustrating so a lot of the strokes were left unfinished, especially the last few white ones. At the same time, unlike @theobanoth (the Instagram artist), my artwork ended up looking a lot more dynamic because of the texture created by the brush with each stroke.
There are several things I learnt from the experience that I’m surprised I didn’t really attempt or think of before:
1. Most of the struggle was unnecessary, had I done a little more research or searched for ways to get over the smaller problems, I wouldn’t have struggled with the process as much as I did.
2. A lot of my reluctance to engage in a new process comes from the fact that the end result might not be as satisfying as it would be had I worked with something I was actually good at using. But interestingly, this new medium has planted a seed of some sort in my head that has me thinking of other ways of approaching the same medium. Even if it was born from an inexperienced mind, it does hold value.
Overall, this exercise was rather fruitful in terms of understanding how to approach later exercises and figuring out where and how to end them, even if it is just a miniscule percentage. 🙂
Learning Log 