Link to Houston Home page 1516

Monday, October 20, 2014

Home



The most difficult challenge I faced during the process of creating this piece was the medium. I have never really been a big fan of pastels, and rarely use them, so there was a bit of a learning curve for me to fully understand the medium. To handle this problem, I spent a lot of time practicing with the oil pastels on smaller papers, seeing what colors blend with what other colors, how to layer with the pastels, and figuring out other attributes of the pastel. I think because of this my piece is much stronger than it could have been, although pastels still are not my favorite medium.

To make the house look more like my home, I put a large amount of emphasis on the outside of the house, as my mom and I spend much of our time outdoors. To do this, I heightened the colors in the grass, sky, and shrubs around the house to make them pop out from the house itself. I also changed the accent colors of my house to various shades of purples to make the house look a little more vibrant, so it would not get completely lost in the greenery.

I am fairly happy with this drawing because I honestly did not think that I could use oil pastels whatsoever, and so the fact that I could and was somewhat successful astounds me. If I were to do something different the next time, I think I would focus more on the shadows and light sources in the piece, because I don’t think I captured all of them in my piece. This piece really did challenge me as far as the medium goes, and if I were to redo the assignment I may have given chalk pastels a try instead of oil.

1 comment:

  1. Again, students ran out of time. I will add my comments here.

    A very bold approach with abstract like qualities (see O'Keefe paintings of her home in Abiqui) I enjoy the variation in color on the back room and the varieties in the background trees.

    The shrub wrapped around the entrance is a little flat, appearing like a rug, investigate using value to show form and consider an abstract application to give the shrub some height (may mean adding some highlights?)

    Would recommend considering cropping some off the top for submission.....digitally of course!....

    Thank you to your students for their courage in sharing work with us. This was a great opportunity for us to investigate the rubrics and to see how the stages transition. We look forward to continuing this process. (will begin photographing next week) Look forward to sharing again on Nov 1st.

    SG

    ReplyDelete