Learning about the history and the style of well-known painters is a great way to gain a foundation. By reading about art history, our brain will know what style we can mix up. Our eyes get trained by looking at great paintings. From there, our hands know how to paint better. My topic for the research project is Salvador Dali and the style that he spent most of his life painting: surrealism.
This research has two parts. Part 1 is a traditional research where I have to find information about Dali and Surrealism, write a report and make a presentation. Pretty easy!
Part 2 is not so easy. We have to paint a still life using the style that the great artist we just research on. Me, no surrealist yet I have to paint a surrealistic still life. I am totally lost!
I started out by sketching the still life at different angles and different crops. I used my pencil and note pad the same way as I use my camera in terms of finding a better composition. Once I have a pretty good composition, I used the projector to project the little sketch onto a 18x24 canvas.
The objects and my sketchbook
The final version is the combination of these two
Roughly sketched on the canvas
I used colored oil pastel to outline again. Notice the blank behind the still life? I have to make up something for that part!
A window, a mirror? What???? Undecided for now!
I start blocking in the color! I have made my mind that a window looks pretty good behind everything.
The sky behind the plant really is kicking my b*tt. Since nothing is really “real” and I don’t have any reference to the cloud, I keep messing up! Note the paint chip at the right corner of my canvas. That is the color reference!
Since Dali used a lot of cloud image and butterflies as well as surreal shadow in his paintings, I also want to try that. I make the horse’s hair cloud and his eye become a butterfly. The shadow of a leaf becomes the horse’s vein (or whatever you want to call it)
This project, I have to say, is my most challenging project I have ever had for painting. I did not know what I want to paint. I did not do any color sketches to plan everything. It was a disaster at first! I will mix color on my palette and mix again right on my canvas. There was time that I got so frustrated because I chose such a different style than mine to work on. I am glad I gave it a try though. Now I know that surrealism is NOT my friend at all.
P.S: Check back soon, I will post more photos of this project when the paint is dry. That way the color is going to be more accurate.
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