JULY 2016


 

The theme for this month was a continuation of the previous month’s. With a few tweaks.

I chose to present the images in a consistent 16:9 format. Not to sound too cocky, just I felt like they had a prestige about them that suited the format, also I’m OCD as all hell. It also added to the difficulty of obtaining a final image. With the previous month, I didn’t have full control of the paints for the most part, and there were way too many “happy accidents” for my taste. By going with a more “cinematic” display, I had to be very picky when it came to framing the compositions. Also- I wanted to challenge myself with not only the color schemes, but also the post work. This led me to come up with the unsaid rule of the month- every image is inverted.

The challenge then became to plan out in advance what colors I would be going for, and digitally inverting them to see what I would need to start with. One of the reasons so many pieces this month were predominantly red was because I was sitting on a whole lot of blue paint that needed to get used up.

The unforeseen problems were the difficulty of simplicity. A lot of the previous month’s pieces had a cool dynamic to them just due to the physics of it, since a good portion of the paint was added combined with oil prior to mixing. Although again, this was experimented on. Vegetable oil is cool, but it has a warm yellowish tint to it. Coconut oil was the cleanest I could find, but the paints would break down into far smaller “spheres”. This month I wanted to try and control the paint a bit more, go for much smoother transitions as if I was going across a canvas with light whips of a fan brush. Eventually I found that if I left paints out overnight, they lost some of their viscosity, and I was able to control them a lot better. The biggest downside to that is that my studio (Not to mention the girlfriend’s kitchen. Sorry babe!) was absolutely littered with plastic cups of paint. Amazingly only one got tipped over, yet another reason I was glad to go with acrylics.

The only takeaway from this month was that since I was doing macro shots under less than desirable lighting conditions, the final pieces seemed to be missing a fidelity that came from using my iPhone’s camera. The macro lenses were great, and I was using VSCO to get the best captures I could. These problems would directly lead me to the next month’s challenge..