In the Studio

Having the freedom to work on whatever I want in my senior studio honestly stressed me out at first. I tend to do better when I'm given a direction or an idea to build off of. I wasn't sure how to get started so instead of wasting time, I used most of my first day in the studio working on a project for another class. (during the making of this piece, I figured out what my first studio painting would be.)

The assignment was called Obstructions. One of my peers had to give me a few limitations/guidelines to follow when making a piece. I knew I wanted to do a portrait and include some abstraction in the background (after seeing Andrea Soos' work--the topic of my first post). The obstructions assigned to me were "use one brush for the whole piece" and "paint the portrait with unusual colors."

I started off by setting up my color palette. Then I began creating a background of shapes and color by referencing a photo of main street in Ephrata. Once the acrylic dried, I adjusted the placement of the portrait based on the background. The portrait was done in all blue with the exception of the glasses which I wanted to make pop. The last step was building up some of the shapes from the background on top of the figure to merge the two.