Project: Movement. Week 4. Thursday, 1/02/24.
I did a bit of thumbnailing for what I had in mind and even shot some reference pics in my bathrooms doing different actions/ different positions to help decided with what direction I wanted to take this painting. My initial idea was to create a portrait of my past self looking into the mirror at my current self, reflecting my theme of the movement of time and how much I've changed since cutting my hair for the first time.
I decided to further emphasise the change between my past and future self with colours, duller colours for the past and highly saturated eye catching colours for the future. I had to do some thumbnails for how to balance out the colours, and look at some older works of mine to see how I did it in the past. I settled on using primarily red, yellow, blue, green, and orange as my colour pallet. However, I've never used them in the way I intended to here, so it was certainly a new experience.
I started off by choosing a reference picture and doing a rough under drawing to figure out proportions. When doing my rough sketch I actually taped my phone to the wall and tried to draw from a distance so I could calculate the shapes and proportions as accurately as possible.
I decided that since the interior and exterior of the mirror are very different in colour schemes, I would work on one at a time, I chose to focus on inside the mirror to start off with. Once that was done I began blocking out my main base colours and went about adding shadows. the light shadows helped start the process of shaping the face. It was a very "trust the process" sort of situation.
I knew with the approach I took I wouldn't be able to get away with solid blocks of colour for the hair and shirt, so I experimented with layering different colours to gain different textures. For the hair I tried building shapes with different layers of blues and greens before going in with a dark blue for the darker areas and shadows, I then went in with some red and light green highlights. It was certainly an improvement.
As for the shirt, It was very trial and error, I actually had to repaint over certain areas. I settled with using my light blue for the main shadows on the shirt to add a sense of dept, the translucence of the blue paint on top of the orange worked in my favour. Since blue and orange are on opposite ends of the colour wheel they tend to cancel each other out a bit, resulting in a duller hue of blue which was perfect for the shadows. I went in with greens to blend out the blue at the edges and yellow for highlights, I used bits of red and dark green for creases and wrinkles in the shirt. When I was doing the blue areas, I actually covered large areas at a time and then would drag the back of my hand through it removing a lot of the paint and leaving an interesting texture, similar to a wedge tool shown to us during the tool workshop.
That's all the progress I made for Thursday
