AP Art Concentration 5 & 6

Piece 6

Piece 5

These two pieces are where I think my technique really begins to improve. I used a new medium, gauche, for the black areas of piece 5. Gauche has a very odd jumble of properties. It is kind of like paint that mixes like acrylic, but if it is thinned out it applies like a watercolor. Yeah, weird. Acrylic and watercolor combined. I thought it was useful for doing a large, flat area of color but I wouldn't like using it to paint anything other than that. It is very inflexible and doesn't blend well.


Piece 6 is where I began to work faster, trying not to worry about really nitpicky (if that is even a word) details. I'll admit that part of this was due to the fact that I was running out of time to finish my AP Portfolio so I didn't really have choice. It was either hurry up or not finish. Speeding up actually helped to give my paintings a more painterly feel. Rather than trying to achieve an exact replica of my reference pictures I experimented with simpler backgrounds. I actually like the variations in texture from the ink washes.  


I also experimented with using watercolor pencils more like a paint pallet. I didn't color directly on the drawing and then apply water to it. Instead, I colored an area on a different piece of paper and then applied water to that. I then used the colored water on the brush to paint with. This was useful for avoiding unwanted texture when painting metal surfaces but avoided the time it would take to mix watercolors. One of my favorite parts of the AP process is seeing the improvement from start to finish, and there is definitely some improvement here! :)