Painting II is an awesome class to take at Marywood because you get to experiment with acrylic paint and learn new things that you may not have known about painting. It’s a class that expands on what is learned in Painting I and is required as an illustration major. Our first few projects got us started on how to work in black and white first, then in color, so it is at a pace where you are not overwhelmed by too much all at once.
For our very first project we could only use black, white, and grey and we painted a simple still life with blocks and other basic shapes. Our goal at the beginning was to lay out the composition of the painting with five or more straight lines that outlined what we wanted to include in the painting. Then we had to find large areas or our darkest color and fill in all of those areas with the darkest dark. From there were worked our way up to the next darkest color and so on until we filled in the highlights. This was a great project to begin with because you don’t have to worry about all of the colors and lights and darks within those colors which can seem overwhelming.
The colored painting that we did after the black and white one dealt with using only four colors which were two warm and two cool. We again started with the composition, and the goal after that was to find the darkest areas first. An example for the colors would be a darkest blue, a dark orange, a light purple, and the lightest one being yellow. We had to work our way up looking at the still life to find areas that were close in value using only the four colors chosen. Overall this project helped ease us into painting with color, and was a great way to challenge us as an artist.
