Expreimenting and having fun

It's the hight of crunch time at Sheridan college, but what the hay, I gotta have some fun!
John has sparked my curiosity with the Gross/Lozzi idea, so I had to finish up my assignments and obey my urge to experiment.The medium I used- Acryla by Holbien. This Japanese brand is a mix of gouache and acrylic, it's the easiest medium I've ever used, I've got to thank instructor Tim McCormack for introducing us to it. It's got very stable consistency, it's fun to mix and stroke, you can get straight into painting without struggling too much to get used to the material. The Brush I use is by Deserres (no 6) It's sold at the Canadian art supply store Loomis (Also known as Omar Deserres) For it's cheap price it's surprisingly stable, sharp and professional.

First I mixed the color for the wall and rolled it on the entire image, later rolled the color for the floor.
I cut out friskets from cels for all the major shapes, and used them with rolling, sponge and brush.
This is the first try which I don't consider to be very successful, it looks too much like a Garfield background. except for using different colors I took notes to try new sponges, the sponges I used in here are hardly noticeable, slick industrial sponges you use for cleaning are too moist and have too little texture. My roommate Mitch introduced me to sponges he uses (in the picture above) which are more natural looking and have great patterns and textures.
I also discovered that the sponge picks up the paint better if you apply it on using a brush, and not by dabbing the sponge in the paint, You'd have to mix so much more paint for that to work. Another note I took for the rug in this image, is to color the light color first and apply the dark color later, so that the light color would show through.


So I traced the layout again, and this time planning the whole painting process in advance. I tend to get distracted when I paint and let the paint itself lead my brush, but that doesn't work if I want control over my painting.

I also took note of the color mixing. I realized the previous color choices were boring because the mix was too even. ( i.e. 50% blue, 50% white)
The color I mixed for the wall this time consisted mostly of light gray (30-40%) a bit of vardian, carmine , yellow and sky blue (All varying percentage) I used a bit of all the colors in this list for every other color I mixed to try and create a family of colors.


This is the result, the scan isn't completely accurate to the real life colors, I'm not sure how to get it right except for playing with the contrast/hue/saturation. I also added a digital snapshot which shows slightly different colors.


Now to study for the "Art in a cultural and social context" exam and essay,
G'nite!