Week 2 Main Project

This week I decided to focus upon oil painting. I have not used oils in a while, and since I have explored other techniques, I feel I should revisit this one with my new knowledge and experiences.

My Oil Painting of an ear.

I doubled the size of the original cropped ear photo, onto Fabriano paper. Then begun by adding the dark components to the painting. Through out the week I added more to the piece, I aimed to get a high contrast of tone to show depth, but I also wanted a highlighted flesh like colour. I am quite proud of the end piece, I do feel that the size may be too big for the piece but next week I am going to do a slimmer painting of a cropped ear to compare.

Also this week, I decided to use latex. This is a material I have never used before so I didn't know how to approach it. Initially, I was going to create a 3-d cropped ear piece in clay, then vacuum form it and pour the latex on top. But after talking to Jeff, we realised that if I make a plaster mould instead of plastic, the latex would have a better finish! It took me all week to get the latex piece, this was because of the waiting for the plaster to fully dry as well as adding the latex layers slowly. The mould looks very good, I am going to do more of them and maybe experiment with the size of the latex piece. I may also add colour to the latex or paint on top of the latex once it has been made.

In the week before, I took photos of my friends 'party trick', it was a series of movements changing the way his body looks. I found this intriguing and this week I decided to use it in my project. I went over each picture with tracing paper, only the key outlines were drawn on. I was aiming to overlay each drawing but I found that the tracing paper was not translucent enough. So I grouped them in 3's and drew over the group. Forming a mass of lines to show movement. Then later I realised I could of used acetate, by knowing this, I used the compilation pieces and drew them onto the acetate, later scanning them into the computer to enlarge them. My aim is to produce a large acrylic painting from these lines, I am also experimenting with capturing the blend of colour in my friends 'party trick', I shall incorporate this into my painting as well.

One of the compilation pieces put onto acetate and scanned into my computer.