Art Time: Still Lifes

For the first two months of painting we have had to do still lifes. And this cow skull is essentially the only still life I had done that I actually like. They were all well done, but I actually quite like this one, as does my painting teacher. Done with acrylic on a board, working with glazes, mostly. It took me all of class, about six hours, because I did layer after layer, glaze after glaze, which is basically you have some paint with, in my case, a lot of matte medium, and just putting on very faint coloured layers. You can see turquoise and blue under the red drapery, and you can see yellows and purples under the cow skull. At the end, for the drapery I worked wet-on-wet. I just made up a buttload of the red colour, light shades, medium shades, and darker shades, to make the highlights and the shadows, as well as the general colour of the sheet. Which wasn't actually red, but I took artistic liberty.

The other still life I did that I actually enjoy was these sunflowers in a vase. I actually hate the background, but I didn't want to change it because I had already painted on the flowers. I just realized that I don't have the finished picture up here, and I don't have it on my computer, which makes me believe I haven't taken a picture of the final product. So I will be sure to do that and then edit this section later. But in the meantime, these are my flowers.

This particular project was the very first assignment of ours where we could be creative and take artistic liberties. It was called Ode to a Common Thing, and I decided to do a lipstick, obviously. It was a picture I found off the internet, but I mostly just made it all up. The background was the funnest thing to do, and I just did layers upon layers of colourful glazes, and the final layer, which you can't really see, I used super heavy gloss medium to give it texture. The black part of the lipstick has a lot of sparkly silver on it, to make it shiny and sparkly. The pink lipstick portion is all goopy and actually looks like lipstick, and the final background has a bunch of lip prints on it. I literally took my paintbrush and painted my lips, and kissed my board. It was excellent. I am most impressed with the shadow on the ground; I don't actually know how I got it to look that realistic, but I am most impressed with that part, even though it took about five seconds, compared to the hours that it took me to do the lipstick.