Pieces of Positivity Painting: For this painting Britt had us mindlessly paint on a canvas, we added layers and layers over each other, personally for mine I changed it many times because I didn't like the way it looked. Once we had many layers we chose a quote that focussed on positivity and illustrated that on our canvas. My quote is "If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain." - Dolly Parton. I chose this quote because I like the message it is sending and I love Dolly Parton. Since my quote is talking about rain and a rainbow I illustrated it to fit the quote. Canvas size: 14 x 20 2022
Coal painting/nature study: For this project we found something that we wanted to paint, something that related to nature or durango in general. I chose to paint a picture of the Olde School House, the restaurant up by purgatory ski resort. For this painting we could only paint with coal, Britt (the art teacher) had this amazing idea to go to the train station and gather goal. I help Britt dilute the coal in baby oil and water mixed with glue. Some of the mixtures we strained to get that paint-like effect, the other ones we left with the chunkiness to give it a texture on top of the painting for a ruff looking effect. I mostly used the chunky paint because I wanted to have a lot of texture on the painting. We also got the option to paint 30% of the painting with watercolor. This was a really fun project and I had a lot of fun experimenting with the coal. It was also a very challenging project because the coal was very difficult to work with. Artist Statement: For my coal painting I decided to paint the Schoolhouse. The Schoolhouse has a lot of sentimental value to me as I grew up going there after a long day of skiing. Some of our good family friends own the Schoolhouse which is up on the way to Purgatory, so that’s why we were always there. I thought it would be a good challenge for me to paint a building rather than a nature scene. I really enjoyed all the steps of this process, the actual coal that we used to paint with was really challenging to use. I helped Britt mix the coal with baby oil and walnut oil to dilute it. We strained most of the mixtures so they would be more like watercolor. The reason this was so challenging to paint with is because it was very oily and took a long time to dry. The painting process was really long because of the time it took to dry. There was one mixture that we made, which was glue and water mixed with the coal, for this one we didn’t strain it so we could have texture on the paintings. I enjoyed using the glue and water mixture the best because it added a lot of texture to my painting. In my reference photo of the Schoolhouse, the red color on the top of the building really stood out to me. I wanted to use at least a little bit of color on mine, so I used red watercolor paint for the pieces of the building that were red. We were allowed to use 30% of color on our paintings, so I painted the sky blue and some red/orange leaves towards the bottom of the painting. Overall I thought this was a really good challenging project to work on, I had a lot of fun during the process.