Green Hills

When I first began this project, what came to my mind was, “How was I going to express my message to the viewer, the audience?” It took me a couple days before beginning it in order to realize what I truly wanted to say in the form of strokes. I finally was able to map out what I wanted my message to be and finally, it came out to be, “Messages can take the form of colors.” This statement was able to guide me through the whole project as it allowed me to only purpose my message. The colors were there to convey it and have the ability to communicate the message to the viewer. Before coming to this high school, I was able to conduct a deeper analysis of the arts and literature. During that time, I tried to find the meaning of the art besides just dismissing it with, “oh that looks nice.” There is more to the piece than what we make it be. During this project, I was able to analyze an artist who I am really fond of and produced my own style in the process. For this project, I decided to do Limited Palette. Limited Palette allows the artist to only use 5 colors. I decided to use watercolor paint rather than acrylic paint.

A technique that I had to develop was trying to “stitch” using the paint brush. I am uncertain as to what the technique is called, however, it played huge contribution to my work. The technique allowed me to display the leaves of the trees and make value into the piece. The technique is essentially using simple “x” strokes across the canvas. However, you want to make sure you have a small brush if you decide to make the image further away. This is a mimic from one of Bob Ross’s own technique I saw on his tv show. As such, his art has inspired me to do something similar, creating the beauty of nature using just 5 colors. Techniques are very important to the work and especially the artist. The artist needs to develop a technique in order to make the work consistent. A consistent story can tell a story whereas a dictionary cannot.

Present in my work, there are trees scrambled all over the place. However, there is one tree that seems to be close to the viewer, located on the right. Finally, there are mountains in the background, coated with a lot of colors. For the project, I decided to use Permanent Light Green, Phthalo Blue, Burnt Umber, Brilliant Red, and Chinese White. The Light Green was used primarily on the leaves, and I knew I could make the paint more transparent due to the fact that this is water coloring. Phthalo Blue was used more on the sky and the mountains, with some on the ground. Burnt Umber was used mainly for the trees and giving texture to the wood. Brilliant Red was also used for the mountains. Finally, Chinese White being used mainly for giving definition. I mixed the colors Brilliant Red and Phthalo Blue to get a similar purple color. Personally, the color looks like the many visible colors in the galaxy. Thus, I decided to use it on the mountains because it felt “distant” enough. At first, I watered it down to get the concept of what I pictured the base to be. Then Mrs. Hertz instructed me to use less water to get more of the colors into the piece. For the trees, I used a mixture of Burnt Umber and Permanent Light Green. Mixing the colors gives a very light brown and it was very good to give the contrasts of the trees. The stitching technique was very useful for the trees as well. I was able to stitch leaves into the canvas using the technique. I even combined Phthalo Blue and Permanent Light Green together in order to paint in the ground, the hill. This work is very similar to my previous work. It had trees and hills, however, lacked the mountains in the background.

In conclusion, I have learned a lot through the process of this project. This project allowed me to explore the many colors and possible combinations to get a different result. The Limited Palette was very challenging, but it makes the artist improvise when producing his/her artwork. Throughout the challenges I had to face, I could say that I am very proud that I was able to use colors to make other colors stand out. However, with many warm accomplishments, I also wish I had done things differently. I wish that I could have made the grass more visible rather than being transparent. The difficult of water coloring makes it very challenging to make things stand out since the water only makes the colors more transparent. I also wished I had not used such a big brush as it started to ruin up my canvas by giving it visible “cracks”. Overall, I am very proud of my work and the project was very challenging but fun.