Hi, I am Annachiara Chacchia and I am so excited to be the new painting blogger for Where Creativity Works. For my first post I want to talk about the experiences I had in my first painting class, Painting I with Steven Alexander.
I was really excited to start my first painting class at the beginning of the semester, especially because I am a painting major. The first class was just a demo so I didn’t actually get to paint, but the rest of the year was no let down.
During the semester we worked exclusively with oil paints, painting a small variety of subjects. We started off with still life’s and then moved on to exterior/interior paintings. I really enjoyed doing the still life’s because that is predominately what I did in high school, so I was familiar with it. We soon moved on to figure and portrait paintings where a model would come in for 1-2 days and we had to do a quick oil sketch. After that we did some abstract paintings.
Working with oil paint was really interesting, I hadn’t had much experience with it before. Their paint takes a long time to dry as in that way you can make a lot of changes but that also means you have to wait a while to paint over it.
One of the thing that I found really interesting was the idea of an under painting. Painting the opposite color of what you see underneath is a great way to make your colors pop. For example if painting a red vase, green shades of paint would be applied underneath the local color which is the red that is seen. I used this for all of my paintings after I learned. I really liked the hint of color you see behind the visual color.
Painting I is required for most art majors as apart of their Foundation Year classes, but I would suggest it to anyone who is interested in art. You learn about composition and translating real life objects on to canvas with only paint. You can also play around with color, which is that part that I enjoyed the most.
Until next time, keep dreaming up colors.