Roisin Gaffey

@K00337305 1st Year LSAD Year One Painting Project: Gathering and developing visual information of the human figure in every day settings.

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Final Exhibition

As we are finishing up for the end of first year, I picked 2 of my paintings from the colourful composition project and 2 paintings from the human figure project. I chose these as I feel that these were my strongest paintings that I have completed.

When we were first told about the colour project, I (along with my classmates) thought we would be painting our own individual colourful items that we brought from home. But to my surprise the tutors wanted us to build a composition of all the objects together (like a big sculpture). I wasn't too sure about the project the first few days, but when I found the sections that were interesting in my opinion, I started to enjoy the process. Mixing the colour palette for these paintings were important.

The second project that we started on the 13th of April was of the human figure in everyday setting, particularly in our own surroundings such as college, the smoking area, the park, cafes, shops, streets. If I am being completely honest, I struggle with drawing people so this was a little challenging for me, especially making the right skin tone for the people that I painted. But I'm glad I came out of my comfort zone. That's a good thing to do every once in a while.

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Final Painting:

This is a painting based off of a sketch that I did of Anna when we were sitting in the canteen during lunch time. I tried to use a blue paint wash before I put the base colours down, but I added too much blue paint so the layer came out thick and I couldn't see the sketch that well anymore. So, I outlined parts of the sketch that I could see with white paint.

Unfortunately, I did not use all the paint that was mixed, which meant that I had to throw away. I am still learning how to mix the right amount of paint to avoid waste, but it's better to have too much than not enough.

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Artist Research: Tracey Emin

Dame Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. She uses a wide range of media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, film, photography, neon text and sewn applique.

Emin is known for creating intimate pieces inspired by her personal experiences.

'The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here'

I found the bottom photo in the book 'The National Portrait Gallery' by Liz Rideal. Although it isn't a painting, I love how she expresses herself in her artwork by posing for the photograph in nude.

This photo was taken in a beach hut in which she used to go there on weekends with her boyfriend. She was posed naked as Emin thought the nakedness of her own body represented the nakedness of the beach hut. I'm unsure as to who took the photo of Tracey.

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Artist Research: John Minton

John Minton was a self-portrait artist and was a member of the Soho set , which are a group of artists so called because they frequented Soho drinking clubs such as the Colony Room.

He was a major figure in the Neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Although he had a short life resulting in committing suicide when he was 39, he had a reputation for being a generous and vital person. He once stated "No one mirrors his age clearer than the artist. For here is the living moment made concrete, the particular made general, the symptoms diagnosed, the order made from disorder."

I love how Minton uses facial expressions in his self-portraits. For three years (1943-1946), John taught illustration at the Camberwell College of Arts. He also taught drawing and illustration at the Central School of Art and Design from 1946 to 1948.

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Artist Research:

On Friday I went to the library in search of books that I could reference based on artists that paint figure paintings and self-portrait paintings.

Certain books that I found that caught my eye were: 'National Portrait Gallery-Insights-Self-Portraits' by Liz Rideal, 'Painting People' by Charlotte Mullins, and 'The Art Of The Portrait' by Norbert Schneider.

Looking through these books I will pick out artists that are of interest to me and their approaches towards portraiture.

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Life Drawing with Eoin (Thursday 23rd April):

Today, I decided to join Eoin's class for life drawing at 1:30pm after lunch. I used a variety of mediums such as watered down paint, charcoal, and pencil. Every 30 minutes the model would switch poses. He posed 4 times in total. I particularly enjoyed drawing pose three with the charcoal, as I thought this pose was very interesting and a little more difficult to draw.

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Processes of another finished painting:

On Wednesday, I finished this scene that I sketched when I was in a local cafe back in my home town (in Co. Offaly). I enjoyed the process of this painting as you can see the changes in each stage of the photo. I also think the yellow ochre wash was very helpful and beneficial as it didn't look as intimidating compared to starting on a white page.

Compared to my last portrait of my family, I decided to scale down a little, so used A3 card, which wasn't as daunting and I was able to work comfortably. Although it is good to come out of my comfort zone every once in a while.

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Palette Knife Painting:

On Tuesday I decided to try the palette knife that Sylvia suggested to do. So, I set myself up with an easel, a mirror and a drawing board. When I was all set up, I first sketched out my portrait using my reflection of the mirror, then I mixed my three colours (dark, middle, and light tone), and blocked in the three colours.

Once the first layer of the painting dried, I then went back to the add more details such as the facial features. I found applying the first layer of paint easy to apply with the palette knife, but when it came to the details, it was a little more challenging than I thought. I just trusted the process and kept going, even if I wasn't completely happy with the outcome of the painting.

There's always room for improvement :)

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Painting at a larger scale:

Today I finished a painting of a sketch that I did of my mam at home sitting at the kitchen table at breakfast. I enjoyed the process of this painting. However, there were some colours in which I was struggling to mix to make it look similar to when I was sketching the moment.

I feel like some of the painting is out of proportion but overall I think I think I made a pretty good attempt

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Painting from old photos:

When my mam was looking through old photos, she came across a photo of when I was a child. I thought to myself that this was a perfect opportunity to use this photo as part of my project of painting people. I enjoyed creating this painting.

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Tuesday the 14th of April: Self-Portrait

Today, I decided to paint a self-portrait using the method like we use in Sylvia's nude drawings on Thursday. I mixed three different tones of one colour- one dark, one medium, and one light. Before I decided to paint using the three tones, I did a quick sketch of my reflection in the mirror and what my eye could see in the background and behind my easel.

Unfortunately, the plotting of the painting wasn't working in my favour. So I decided to start a new portrait using the reflection of the mirror.

The second attempt was a little bit easier. Like the first one, I sketched out what I was painting and then used the same three tones of blue.

What I didn't mention in the first half of this post is I used a palette knife to apply paint (as if I was applying butter). I did not get the chance to finish this exercise because I used too much of one colour on my face and my body. So the paint was too wet to paint over the areas that I wanted to change. I will come back to finish this portrait when I'm in the painting studio again.

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Monday the 13th of April:

Today, my classmates and I spent the morning watching each other present the presentations of our chosen artists. After that, in the afternoon, I was given a mirror positioned on an easel, so that I could paint myself while sitting on a chair.

First, I sketched out my face and hair, I then started mixing colours in which I needed for my self-portrait. I struggled to create the same shade of colour as my hair, so I decided to paint my hair an undertone of dark purple/maroon and then adding a lighter pink/red on top and blending it out.

When I took a step back from my painting, I noticed my skin tone looked a little orange. So, I mixed more white to the skin tone that I made on my palette.

This is my finished A5 self-portrait. If I have time to go back to this paining , I would change the tone of my hair, fix the shape of my eyebrows, and change the shade and shape of my lips.

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Thursday the 26th of March ( Life Drawing with Eoin)

As usual, on a Thursday, we had life drawing with Sylvia at 9:30am, or with Eoin at 1:30pm. Today, I chose to do the afternoon life drawing with Eoin. We had our usual model but this time he was posing with a flag and sometimes sitting down with the flag propped on his shoulder. In total, we drew the model in 4 different poses and with and medium that we wanted.

The mediums that I chose were watered down Indian ink, charcoal, and pencil. If I'm being completely honest, I found the 3rd pose a little difficult, as I struggled with the proportions of the legs and the way the model positioned them.

But i tried and that's all that matters. I find that these weekly drawing exercises are helping me build my confidence drawing people and learning to not be so precious about my work and that its ok to be messy and make mistakes.

For example, I tried to experiment with the Indian ink by spreading a thin layer on the page first. But unfortunately when I tried to draw the model posing, the ink was only showing up on the page faintly. So I quickly decided to try to sketch on the page anyway but I was running out of time. I decided to take a fresh sheet of paper and just draw using the ink and my paintbrush

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Painting another section

I chose this part of the composition to paint because I liked the contrast of the blues in the bucket and the blue and orange of the toy in the top right corner.

I particularly enjoyed mixing the colour palette for this painting.

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Smaller scale paintings:

Today I focused on these two small scale watercolour paintings. I enjoyed working smaller scale and taking a break from the large scale paintings as I can find them quite daunting. I felt like I had more time to put more detail in as I was used to working smaller scale.

Here are the reference photos that I used for my watercolour paintings. Unfortunately, the cropped photos which showed exactly what I painted, were not able to upload onto One Drive.

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Artist Research Presentation- Jennifer Packer:

Today I gave a 5-minute presentation based on the artist that I picked to research, which was Jennifer Packer. Packer is a black American artist who painted portraits based on real events that happened to the black community. Her work consists of shades of warm colours(such as yellows, reds etc) and shades of cold colours (such as blues, greens, etc). I chose Jennifer as my artist because I thought she painted in a way that showed emotions in her paintings, even most of the portraits that she painted had no emotion, or even little to no face at all.

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Finishing Details (Mon 23rd of March)

Today I added more detail to my painting. Compared to the last post that I made of this painting, I feel that the it has improved a lot, especially in the quality and colour analysis. Eoin liked how I made the colours on my painting so similar to the photo. Scale wise and proportion wise, I feel like I could improve in those areas, perhaps by roughly sketching out before I start to paint.