One of my goals with creativity this year was to explore different art mediums. While I’ve confined myself to mainly watercolour and graphite within the past few years inspired by binge-watching my favourite artists during the lockdown, I was determined to give oil paint a try. After a visit to my local art store, I returned with a can of gesso, tubes of oil paint, bottles linseed oil and some fresh canvases. I chose to buy smaller square canvases, to begin with as I’m often intimidated by larger surfaces. But I do hope to eventually move onto creating larger pieces.

The first piece I created was an eye study. One thing I really had trouble with was learning work from darker areas to the lighter ones as this philosophy is completely contradictory to what I’m used to as with watercolours you usually work for light to dark. Another problem I faced was learning to mix skin tones and colours in general. As the medium was foreign to me the process was definitely not intuitive. So I resorted to my usual solution: youtube. I found a range of videos that explained the topic quite well and did my best to learn from them. I’m also a visual learner so I tend to learn by watching process videos posted by artists I follow.

The second piece that I painted was similar to the first one but I believe I improved slightly in terms of mixing skin tones but it does still need a lot of work. This was created during our school’s off-screen wellness day. Painting is something that helps me relax and take my mind off the stress of school work and university applications so I think this was a great way to spend my wellness day. Overall I’ve found the process of delving into a new medium quite exciting and enjoyable and it really helps me learn new techniques and keeps me motivated to paint. Oil paint has also taught me to be extremely patient as I no longer have the luxury of finishing a painting in three hours but have to wait days for initial layers to dry. This has made me cherish the process of painting over the satisfaction of seeing the final result. 

In addition during my school art club, I learnt about artist Robyn O’Neil who specializes in psychological landscapes. Inspired by her work I created a piece that shows two figures hiking up a mountain at to different points. I used white colour pencils and a  gel pen to create the piece on solid black paper. The idea behind the piece was a reflection on the importance of perspective and my thoughts on how the world often try to compare people despite their paths and journeys being extremely different.

On another note, I’ve also been trying to experiment with different styles of art. Most recently, I’ve been painting smaller gouache pieces of scenes from old Disney movies and animes. While these are only studies at the moment and not essentially originals I believe they’re a good springboard to start learning things like character design. I’ve also continued to work on my pencil portraits to further develop my skills in this area.