Radiating Moonlight

 

I did a radiating moonlight painting kind of as a comparison to my radiating sunset. The sunset painting used a baobab tree and an elephant, whereas this one uses a pine tree and two foxes. So both have three factors: point of light, foliage, and animal.

I think a lot of people will see wolves when they look at this, because in our society wolves are associated with the full moon. However, foxes are on my list of animals I associate with, while wolves are not, which is why I went with what I did. Foxes are nocturnal too, so it's not unrealistic to see them out at night.

The animals aren't as much the focus in this one as in the sunset, because here the light dims at the edges and so anything closer to the edge is less in focus, making the foxes more like "flavour". The real star of the show is the pine tree, because it "interrupts" the moon by being one of the darkest objects meeting the lightest point.

For the sunset I used a long, horizontal canvas, because I wanted to show the sun, baobab, and elephant separately to kind of guide the eye and force a size comparison. For this one, I wanted everything closer to the point of light to increase visibility, so I went for a more symmetrical look with a square canvas.

Just like with the sunset, I made my animal silhouettes too large in comparison to the tree. You can imagine them closer to the camera if you like, but I still should have made them smaller.

I did the tree first and wondered if I should add the animals. With just the tree it had kind of a lonely and quiet feeling to it, which kind of works for a night piece. But it felt kind of empty and I still wanted to add a little life to it for some reason, so I went with this.

I don't want to just do points of light and silhouettes forever. It looks good but feels like a bit of a cheap trick if overdone. However, the fact that this just uses one colour, creating a sense of distance from the point of light, while the sunset had a flatter look with contrasting colours, and the addition of stars in this one, make the two paintings unique enough from each other that I think they were both worth doing.

Beluga

 

The branch of the organization I work at is named WALES, an acronym for Working Adults Learning Empowering Skills. It's spelled like the country, but we usually use symbolism from the aquatic mammals that share a pronunciation.

Most of the rooms in the building are based on whales, and as the In-House Facilitator, my room was the Beluga Room. However, I recently was promoted to a Community Facilitator, which means that my office moved to the Narwhal Room. To honour my time in the Beluga Room, I made this painting.

I'd like to paint a narwhal to honour my new office, especially because they're so distinct, but to be honest I still rely a little on reference images and somehow, I can't find any good images of narwhals on the Internet.

I like this painting. It's pretty simple. The only colour used in it is blue, which is managed by white and black. The whale looks cheerful and it makes me happy when I look at it. I didn't go for complex shading, but I think the angling does the job of capturing perspective and motion.

Elephant Sunset, Fruit Bowl, Peppers

Finally did a few paintings at the new place. Pretty similar to some of the stuff in Guelph. Along with these, I also tried to do a painting of carrots, onions and potatoes. In the end, I felt like its' shortcomings were too many to display. Too bad, since I feel like I've done well with carrots and onions before, but they've always been with things that didn't work. This time, I was worried that the potatoes would look like poop, in a literal way. I managed to make them communicate as potatoes, but somehow I screwed up the carrot and onions, which were the things I had confidence in.

Here's my Elephant With Radiating Sunset. I tried the sunset against silhouette trick for the first time during a painting activity that a guest presenter did for us while I was working at the Summer Program. The elephant with baobab tree is a classic look, but it's usually done with mostly black, red, and yellow. For this, I used contrasting colours flowing into and overlapping each other. If I had any regrets, I'd say the elephant is too big. Since the elephant is known to be large, it's supposed to be dwarfed by the baobab tree, giving the viewer a feeling of smallness. The elephant looks like it could eat that tree like a broccoli.

Did a similar fruit bowl in a previous post. In this one, we've got a pear instead of a mango. I liked the mango in the last one, but I guess this is a more classic quartet of fruit. The blue bowl is supposed to contrast the orange tablecloth and also the orange fruit. I really like painting bananas. Their grooves make for nice, clean shadows.

Here we've got four bell peppers. I've already done a painting like this, but it's in Guelph so I thought I'd do another one since I enjoyed the first one so much. If I had to choose a favourite food to paint, it would be bell peppers. Similar to the bananas, they have grooves that are nice and clean, and easily give a sense of direction and dimensionality. For this one, I thought the stem on the red bell pepper didn't have as much dimensionality as I would have liked, and I thought the colour of the green pepper was off through-and-through. It's too dark. I kept comparing the paint on my knife to the pepper, and it kept looking almost turquoise, so I kept darkening it until I knew it was to an absurd extent, and despite how it looked against the pepper, on the canvas it was too dark. The other shadows on it are also too dark, almost black, and it doesn't really make sense that its' stem should be darker than the stems on the other peppers. I still think it overall kind of works, because the viewer knows what it is in the context of the other peppers, but really, the green pepper brings everything down a bit. I think in my last painting, the green pepper looked the worst too. Don't know why that specific shade of pepper is so challenging for me.