I decided to paint my friend Anna because whilst I was in a really calm state of mind and was in the mood to paint I wanted to paint an emotion that reflects on this. I took a photo of Anna and painted straight away. This time instead of the using the grid method which takes to much preporation I painted straight onto the canvas without having an outline on. I started painting the nose then built different tones around it. I didn’t have any serious problems with the piece, some proportions were incorrect but I resolved this in the later stage. To our left, the eye and the cheek area show quite alot of smooth detail. I found this strange because the way i usually paint is, I use my finger to blend colours together rather than using a paint brush to blend tones together completely. So there is alot of traces and I think the paint communicates my different emotions I felt throughout the process. On the right hand side of the painting my attitude changed to feeling tired, and then being impatient. The skin tone looks less smooth to me and at that point I started to use my finger and started applying more colour to certain areas, more where the green tones are on the shadow areas.
I wanted to make the portrait based on realism/photorealsim i felt I achieved this originally the background was suppose to have a block colour representing the emotion that she is feeling. As I painted it on straight away the head was painted bigger than I originally intented, so not much background was exposed. i then thought as I am painting it realism it is obvious what the emotion is so I felt a black colour was not needed, so I painted a bluey-grey colour to compliment her skin tone and her hair colour.
There was a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery that i was a big influence to this portrait in particular. I saw it about three years ago but cannot find out who painted it. It was a chest hieght portrait of a black man with a flourescent pink background. I need to think more about scale now and other ways I could paint differently. Little details are to be added onto her fringe but for now going to work on something different whilst ideas are fresh on my mind.
I went around in the studio looking for people to draw that have emotions of how I want to feel at the time. I apporached my course mate Yvonne and I asked her how she was feeling and she said she felt calm and relaxed. I have always felt that taking a picture of a particular moment is the right way of capturing that emotion rather than drawing from life. I done a quick sketch from the photo using colours that I felt compliment well with the emotion that Yvonne felt. Instead of focusing just on the colour aspect I wanted to see if an emotion can come across with the tools that I use. After the lastest crit with my tutors and peers my tutor mentioned to me it’s almost like you’re painting your self portrait.
What was said is completely right, I usually paint just when I’m in the mood. Now I am painting whenever, even when I’m not in the mood, and it seems to have helped more. Another experiment i done was on my friend Beth, i was going to do the same thing with her, she then came up with an idea of letting her choose the colours that represent her or just out of chance and create something from that. She chose a range of reds, purples and yellows and I then created a portrait from that. With the final result I was happy with it, I felt I could of been more expressive with the colours I had rather than thinking yellow could be be skin tone, more like Yvonne’s.
From my previous posts the drawing I done of Laurel, I felt that pencil was not the right medium to bring her emotion out, so I started experimenting with watercolour pencils. My original idea was to use a variety of skin tone colours and blur the image slightly when water is applied over it to create a really atmospheric sketch. At the stage it is now I felt that the all the layers of colour I added are do much, because when the water is mixed in it will be very vibrant and with all the colour I added I thought the colours would appear muddy. If I was to do it again I would work on a bigger scale and would be more simpler with my palette.
From my previous posts I have talked about the posibility of using sound in my work, this is still an option I am considering. As I spend of my time in the studio lately I never find the time to create music at home. So I am now thinking that I should bring a keyboard to the studio.
This is the final painting of the Lana Del Rey portrait which is titled ‘Falling Into The Abyss’ which captured someone who is becoming lost to the world that she lives in. The still really captures the emotion that I wanted to achieve. Eventhough it was taken from a music video I feel that it seems like a genuine emotion.
When people watch films, that seems to trigger emotions from people eventhough it’s all acted and not real. Film music is a big part of a film and I think that helps set the envionment of certain scenes, so I will experiment painting all different emotions and try create a sound piece, using piano and other instruments to make my paintings come more alive. Hung up I wanted the painting to have an impact on the viewer. The lighting was an important part of the hanging as I was particular of what works best with the painting. In the dark the painting does have a creppy, haunting look to it, other people have mentioned this aswell. Next step is to experiment with more colours and still figure out how I could use sound with my work.
Reflecting on the painting ‘Invidia’ Instead of staging particular emotions, I decided to think about how to capture real genuine emotions. With this sketch I took a photograph of the subject to capture the exact emotion that triggered me towards her. I felt photography was the only way to capture that particular feeling, rather than drawing from life. My subjects emotion may change whilst drawing. Next time I would try to be more experimental with my colours and the way I draw as I don’t think think sketch pencils is the right tool to capture this particular emotion.
In October 2013 just starting the first semester of the final year, I knew I wanted to paint emotions from my subjects faces and wanted to experiment using colour to indicate what the emotion is. The piece titled ‘Invidia’ is a portrait of my course friend Laurel and the painting is to evoke envy. There’s the phrase ‘green with envy’ so I went along with that aspect. I photoshopped the original image that I took on a Canon 550D camera, and added a green tint to the fleshy tones. When painting the piece techinically it was difficult, i found it challenging to paint fleshy tones with a tint from another colour, I was worried about the colour of the paint going muddy. I decided to use a mixture of green paints, and I think the end result was successful. What I would of done differently is to make the emotion less obvious so i would paint just hints of green in the face rather using it as a tint. After painting this I really like how monotone the painting is, so I would like to experiment further with this. The scale of the piece is A0 I felt it was a great size because the face is the main focus point, and the face appeared larger when I started to paint . i think the painting would create an impact in a space.
After finishing painting it, I realised when I cover the half the face with a piece of paper, each eye and shape of the mouth indicate two completely different emotion but overal has one emotion. To our left the eye show upset and betrayal and to the right the eye show more anger. So the overall emotion of jealously seems to be the right emotion.
Yan Pei Ming’s paintings are very expressive and to me are aestheically pleasing to look at. I haven’t seen his work visually in person, but I like all the mark making and texture he used, and interested to see his process of painting.
