gouache

Before I talk about the new Semester

The new semester started last week and again I can’t decide which projects I should pick. There are just too many interesting ones! But before discussing how my 5th semester will look like I still need to upload some traditional paintings from last semester’s seminar in Painting Classes:

Of course there are more paintings but I only wished to share my personal favorites 😉 You might recognize some of the techniques as I actually used them for some of my Illustration course’s final exam artwork.

Illustration Final Exam Summer Semester 2012

Summer semester 2012 was full of landscape painting for me! I tried out traditional media and digital painting as well as all shades of mixed in-betweens.

For our final exam in Illustration we had to work on the theme “Weather, climate, environment” and I decided to keep the concept simple while searching for interesting artistic output at the same time! I wanted to see how far I can mix traditional and digital paintings – using both media’s advantages in combination. Some images are almost purely digitally while others are almost hand-painted only. More on the conceptual idea under the following paintings:

First results in Painting Class

The “Painting” class is all about traditional painting with gouache and acrylics. I painted a few times with gouache some time ago (for my application portfolio) but I wanted to get more used to the material. In my opinion painting and learning to see colors and experimenting with them is really beneficial for artists, even for digital paintings!

Here’s a short description covering some details:

  • only gouache and acrylics allowed (opaque pigment colors, so why not oils? because they need very very long to dry and because of the toxic aspect)
  • (almost) no photographs allowed for reference (sometimes you can make a photo of the object you are drawing in order to finish the painting at home)
  • we mostly paint in class (about 2 hours), but of course we get homework too 🙂
  • we do cover some theoretical aspects but in my opinion not enough…

But enough talking, here are my first results painted during class one and two only (I haven’t touched them at home BUT my scanner let out some soft color shades I couldn’t really recover digitally):

still life with 2 fruits and a coffee-thermo-mug

Gouache on watercolor paper. It's not as opaque as expected from the prof... I'm still thinking the watercolor-way 🙂

Fish in gouache

Gouache on toned cardboard. The blue rectangle was my cooling pad for the fish 😀 I actually ate this exact same fish a few hours later. It was a strange feeling but I didn't want it to go to waste 🙁