Painting Strip Project

Original Painting: Monet, Houses of Parliament

I think that my work shows an understanding of the style and mark making of the original strip because the brush strokes appear to be pretty similar, and my final painting resembles the strip pretty accurately. I tried to differentiate the areas of my painting where there were actual brush strokes that stood out individually from areas with blotting/mixing of the colors on the canvas, where there were less clear individual marks. I also did my best to replicate the colors of my original strip in my painting, by closely comparing the different shades of all of the colors that I used with the strip in order to make sure they were as similar as possible. Through the process of this project, I learned that it takes a lot of time and patience to create exactly the color you want, especially if you have a specific hue in mind that you are trying to match it with. Along these same lines, I also learned that it is extremely difficult to replicate a color that is already on your canvas if it had dried previously and is no longer on your palette to work with. I believe that my final canvas is extremely unified. I started out paying more attention to the center area with the sun and its reflection on the water, and put a lot of effort into perfecting the brush strokes and colors I used. However, after I had spent a lot of time on that one area, I realized that it was disproportional to the rest of the painting, so I then spent more time on the other areas of the painting, and concentrated on improving the brush strokes and colors I had used there. After this project, I feel very comfortable as a painter. I enjoy being able to create colors and manipulate them into exactly what I want, and I think that I have developed this skill through this project. I would be interested in further exploring this medium by painting in different styles, and experimenting with different subjects.  One of the limitations that this medium poses for me is the issue of communicating space and distance––since it is a 2-dimensional painting, it is sometimes difficult to perfectly represent a 3-dimensional object, which I will have to work on in order to improve my painting techniques.