Painting

After the first two painting lessons (which involved painting crumpled up pieces of paper and mixing shades of grey) we were pretty much given free choice of what we wanted to paint (with the light theme in mind) but were told to aim for at least a handful of A3s and a few small samples.

These are each postcard sized.

These are my concept paintings. I like how the sunset turned out, I like sunsets. But who doesn't?

I liked the two light men on the left a lot. They're inspired by an idea I had a few years ago about people who could control and bend light at their will. I decided I wanted to bring those paintings up to a bigger size. But first I made a few other experiments but on A3 paper:

Top: I've used an overhead projector quite a lot in this project so I figured I'd paint one!
Bottom: This is ispired by an image I printed onto acetate for typography

After doing those two, I decided I was ready to paint the light men on a big piece of paper.

The painting on the left was the first I made. The.. bulge is unfortunate and I hadn't actually noticed it when I was painting it, otherwise I would have fixed that. My brushing technique wasn't very good, either. I was using the same sized brush but on big pieces of paper now, this was quite different. I liked my second attempt quite a lot more (on the right). I experimented more with flicking paint onto the paper and tried to make sure my brush was more wet and fluid in general. Here's a photo up close:

These painting are partially inspired by the light painting I did a few weeks ago as well as photographs I found of people interacting with the work of Anthony Mccall;

'Line describing a cone' -Anthony Mccall

After researching these inspirations and looking back at what I'd made, I decided that I wanted my final painting to show the light man interacting with the light even more, like it is an extension of himself.

Wow, yes! That's it!
I'm really chuffed with this painting, I decided to scale the man down on the paper because I wanted space for the light. I also think the brush textures look best on a smaller painting. I let the shape of the light come naturally by daubing my brush around semi-randomly before creating loose tendrils of pastel colour. Quite a few people in my class complimented me on it, 'That's really wicked, Dom' 'When I live in my swanky apartment in LA, I want a big version of that painting on my wall!'
I enjoyed making these paintings and felt that I learnt quite a lot even though we were mostly left to our own devices. It's very cool to look at my little concept painting next to my finished piece, now. I'm rather proud of it! :)