This was painted by water colour which was a quick sketch of my final piece. I always find that water colour is a difficult medium to represent images, as it is extremely hard to entirely blend two colours. Besides, it is time consuming( takes a while to dry). Another disadvantage is that the sides of the paper becomes curly as it dries. I found that when the paper was wetted by water first, two different colours could be mixed easily, as long as enough water was brushed on. When I wanted to make a gradual change from light to dark, the light colour had to be put on first, otherwise the whole area would be dark and messy. I used a hair drier to speed up the drying pace. The hot air blew the excess water to on end, forming a smooth appearance. After painting, I sprayed water evenly on the paper so the sheet became smooth again. Tissue paper were piled on the top to absorb the water, then I took several books to flatten the paper.
I used three different media to show the softness and luminosity of the material. The first one was done by chalk. I used pencil to do the original sketch, then chalk was used to fill the darkest areas. I kept using tissue paper to rub them so they became less defined. While I was doing this, the areas that were not meant to be dark were filled with grey. In the end, I used eraser to clean the areas that meant to be light. Therefore the gradual transfer was completed (light – grey – black).
The second drawing was done by pastel and I think it is the most successful one as it fully produced the smoothness and the shininess of the material (the material did not actually have this shininess, but I think it would be better if it was shining). I used several contrary colours such as green and reddish violet , blue and red, dark purple and light orange. The most interesting thing was this drawing was done a black card. Thus a tone of glowing in the dark was perfectly created.
The one was done by colour pencils which was very similar to my final piece but it was cold colours on the left and warm colours on the right whereas the final piece was reverse. It was not easy to create the shadows when using colour pencils. So I used cotton wool to smooth the surface and lightened the light areas.
The final oil painting was inspired not only by Clease Ordenburg who brought the strong contrast between various items and enlarged the scale of small ordinary objects, but also a painting that was published in a magazine which I can hardly record the name of the painter. It was a portrait but the image was formed by rearranging the features of the person. As the features displayed in disorder, this painting successfully established an aesthetic feeling of unique and unbalance.
Therefore, I photocopied the picture which was a piece of folded corduroy with different scales(x 2, x 1.5 , x 1 and x 0.5), and cut them into sections. Then these sections were rearranged and glued on a card board in rectangular, with three incomplete circles that all had the same centre but different radiuses.
Although the finished vision no longer looked like a piece of folded material, the smooth curves still existed as separate, creating gradual shadows as the light shined on.
The canvas was a big square, I thought it would not be interesting if the whole canvas was filled with cyan, as the initial colour of the material. So a diagonal was drew on the canvas, forming a vivid contrast as the vision was divided into two sections – cold colours an warm colours. For the cold colour section, white, sky blue and back were mainly used to represent the curves. I mixed olive green with navy blue and a bit of black to build the background, so it pushed the rest standing out. For background of warm colour section, black was added to crimson to make it greyer. Whereas for the rest, white, yellow, orange and red were used. I used cross strokes to blend colours to make it looked more interesting.
I think this painting is very successful, especially the gradual blending. It also appears to be unique, as it emerges from fragmentary images. However, I also think it is a pity that too much crimson was used in the warm colour section. It seems that the crimson does not combine with the other warm colours. Also, because of the time limit, it was slightly rushed towards the end.
Red seems go well with blue. I stored the picture of this painting in my laptop by using a digital camera. Then I used Photoshop computer programme to see how would it look if other colours were combined.
