The Final Paintings

The monochromatic paintings are the new paintings I did for this January Term project (January 2011).  The green painting is the original painting that I gained inspiration for doing this project (December 2009/January 2010).  Thank you to Caitlin Cornell for help on the original piece, and to Jeri Swatosh for inspiring and helping me become the best and most articulate artist I can be, and for being a great Core teacher.


-Steven

Process

The way I went about creating this project was by first searching the Internet on ballet company websites, dance wear sites, Facebook, and Google-ing specific dance companies for images that are visually interesting.  Any image could be used if people are trying this our on their own.  For example, models, animals or athletes could be used to create paintings like these, just to name a few examples of other subjects.  When I found three images of dancers that I liked, and that worked well together, I used a copier to enlarge the pictures to make stencils that would fill the canvas space better.  After this, I traced around each stencil, onto the canvas, and drew on the vertical and horizontal lines that I have to juxtapose the dancers.  I have the very geometric lines bordering the dancers because the dancers are in positions that are neither geometric nor symmetrical.  The addition of the geometric lines along with juxtaposing the organic form of the dancers, they add to the movement of the piece by making the viewer's eye move across the canvas.  Starting with my darkest grey, I painted the entire form of the figures.  Next, I used the mid-tone and then the lightest tone of grey to form all of the shadows.  Upon getting to this step in the process of painting, I decided that the Tri-tone color scheme, which I had used in the original piece that I used as inspiration for these three new pieces (the painting in green), was not working out as well as I had hoped.  I decided to paint the areas around the dark, medium, and light tones with intermediate tones of grey to help add dimension and shape to the dancers.  This is the point I am at now.  There are still some touch ups that can be done, but in the time frame for this project, this is all i have time for.  If there are any suggestions of where I should improve the paintings I would greatly appreciate that.  I would like to collaborate with other artists through the Internet to continue and grow as an artist.


-Steven

Process Photos

Here are the photos I took through out my process, after each layer of paint had been painted.

-Steven

J-Term Description

For the J-Term Core Project at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics in Vancouver, Washington, USA, we had to take a previous piece of art work, expand upon it and then share it through a form of technology (YouTube, a blog, etc.) with a potential for collaboration.  I chose to expand upon a series of paintings I did with a partner of Thomas Young and Herman von Helmholtz's Trichromatic Theory.  This theory is about the receptor (rods and cones) in the human eye that capture light.  The receptors pick up red, blue and green light therefore we did three paintings one in red, one in blue, and one in green.  We painted dancers because we had originally wanted to study how the eye captured movement but we were unsuccessful in finding research.  For this J-Term, I decided to select three new dance images and paint them in the same style.  I used black, grays, and white because these were the paints that were available to me at my house.  I had to do a lot of work out side of school because we had three weeks to complete this project and our Core class only meets three days a week for 45 minutes each day.  In this blog, my goal is to show the process that I took to complete these three paintings so that if anyone is interested in creating painting like this on their own they will know how.  I would also like constructive feedback on what people think of the idea, process and final product.

-Steven