This semester, we have worked on and created Dutch till-Life Paintings and Drawings. Throughout this time we used different mediums and created different things, for example in term three we had the choice to do whichever fruit we wanted, and we created them with pastel pencils on a black piece of paper. Whereas this term we have focused on only apples, and we have painted them on black 20x20cm canvases.

STAYING ORGANISED

Throughout this last term, It was hard to make sure that we stayed on track painting our apples, as we missed out on a lot of lessons, and didn’t have much time to finish, so we had to ensure that we were focusing and consistently meeting targets in order to complete the paintings. Some examples of these targets were getting our swatch tests done for our paintings done, so we had a good guide for how to make the colors we were using, or getting our canvases painted fully black with no chips or marks in the paint so that we could start our actual pantings as fast as we could.

BEING INQUISITIVE AND PROBLEM-SOLVING

A skill that I learned throughout this process was that if you keep looking at your painting from up close, it isn’t going to end up how you want it, and you are only going to focus on small areas, so an important thing to do when you’re painting is to look at it from afar every once in a while, so you can have a better look at the whole painting as one. One problem that we overcame while painting our apples was that when we made a mistake or needed to paint over something, we realised that we didn’t have to keep painting over it and blending the mistake out, and we could just dry it with the hairdryer and then go over the dry mistake with a fresh coat of paint. As well as this, we also noticed that when we were starting to paint our apples on the black canvases, the colored paints were not very opaque, and very faint, so we figured out that we had to paint multiple layers to get the colors and shades we wanted.

CREATIVITY/MY FINAL WORK

While I’m happy with my final work, it is still not completely finished. This is mainly because year 10’s did not have many lessons in class to finish it, because of things like exams, PDP days, or camp. There were some other details that I definitely could’ve added, like more detailed textures, like the dots and lighter patches, and I also could’ve made the apple’s stem more detailed. Despite that, I did the most that I could in the time that I had to replicate the original picture in my painting, and I am happy with what I finished with.