THE PAINTING PROCESS
in detail
The painting part of Hairitage was the easiest part of the
project for me as it's something I enjoy doing. However, I did learn some new things through this which is great for me! Here I'll take you through the process of how I got my ideas from my mind brought to life across four canvases.
To start, I already had the poses and general idea of how I wanted each piece to look, so I started with creating digital sketches in photoshop using my drawing tablet. I also experimented with title options but wasn't too concerned with it at this time.
Once the sketches were finished, I moved onto putting them onto the canvases - with the help of my friends Rana and Dom we managed to set up a projector so I could easily trace the digital sketches onto the canvases. Getting the proportions right was a lot harder than I imagined so I'm extremely grateful for all the help! After all of the faces were done, I sketched on the titles letter by letter.
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I also dabbled in perfecting colour scheme in photoshop too - The original scheme was going to be more of neutral toned vibe but I decided to be adventurous and use bright colours - which is not at all like me but I wanted to challenge myself. I also considered making each painting have different opposing colour combinations but decided to keep everything uniform.
Then, I moved onto the actual painting part. Colour mixing became a huge problem as I soon realised the colours were not matching the vision. Firstly, as a self taught artist shockingly I have no idea of colour theory as I've never taught myself it apart from knowing the primary colours (I tend to be more of a trial and error type of person) so colours having different bias' was new to me. The red paint I had mixed with the blue created dull, cold colours rather than the bright, warm ones I was looking for but it was nothing a little research and quick visit to amazon could not fix.
me skecthing
video reference: https://youtu.be/IUc31f0A7CQ
On the left is the colour of the original background - which is what I was planning for (a yellow on the colder side).
Suprisingly, the backgrounds were the
most stressful and almost resulted in me completely starting over halfway through painting.
With acrylic paints a lot of the work shines through layering the paints, so it is easier to go from a lighter to darker colour but almost near impossible to go from dark to light once it has already dried on the canvas. To matters even worse, it was the last one. 3 out of the 4 backgrounds were a perfect shade whilst the fourth was noticeably very different.
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I had to work almost 5 layers of paint on each painting to get all the backgrounds to the same shade. It was not exactly how I intended but I'm grateful it worked out as they still turned out very pretty and matched well with the purple shades.
On the right was the last painting I had done and the mistake of a background colour (a lot more warmer yellow).
