Interchange

As part of my university’s curriculum over the course of two days an interchange is set up. During this time students are allowed to enter workshops to try out and learn new skills from different courses. Although we had a lot of work at the time I choose to do oil painting, as it was something I enjoyed and hadn’t done in many years.

The workshop went over the basics of oil painting; such how substances such as white sprit (turpentine) can clean oil paints off a brush as well as diluting the thickness of the oil paints. Oil itself used with the oil paints let the oils be spread easier while giving the oils some level of gloss.

Another medium we used was bee’s wax, which greatly thickens the oil paint into more of a paste, which could give our paintings a level of texture. We were given the choice within the group to paint objects in the room or whatever we liked. As I found myself feeling nostalgic to when I used to paint in college, I choose to create a most abstract piece, by simply combining form and colours.

During this time I had another project of creating a game which has an under tone message about pollution and the environment, so I used some of that for inspiration for my painting. I realised while painting how much I had missed painting physically as opposed to digitally. I also found that compared to my previous times painting during my college years, I had become more comfortable with colour.

Using the theme of my other project and choosing the base colours that matched the colour palette from my project I began painting. As the project was about pollution and nature I choose pollution to seem more aggressive in the piece. Using oils to loosen then paints, I used long brush strokes in different directions to give a sense of movement and aggression. Instead of using lights and darks to create shades within the pollution side of the painting, I choose to use various ranges of blue and purple to create my highlights and shadows. Combing this with a ‘wet into wet’ style the colours would merge together more roughly and in a overlapping way to suggest movement. I did this, as it is a similar process I used in digital concept art, where in some pieces an artist will use a complete different colour to create their tones.

As for the nature side of the painting I used a similar process of a bass colour combined with different hues of paint to create my tones. However, on the right side of the painting, I choose to be more methodical, to try and portray a more softer and calmer emotion as nature is usually shown as a side of peace. When combining the yellow and green hues, I used a ‘stippling’ technique to create more texture and to blend the colours smoothly.

  

Although just a small one time class, I found that I had remembered a lot about how to use the oils as well as a feeling of nostalgia physically painting again. While I cant say I would go out and buy some paints to continue this, I will take what I learnt from the class into my digital art, hopefully improving my use of colour in my work.