Brushstrokes and Blending: Art Club ASA Update

It has been around 4 sessions of Art Club that I have attended, in which I think so far, I am aiming to accomplish my overall goal quite well. For instance, to specify I wanted to get into exploring more media of art, which is what I have been focusing on for the past couple weeks.

In these four sessions, I have tested out pastels, and watercolors, but through different techniques. As for the pastels, I first went online, on Pinterest, and browsed for some inspiration to help spark some ideas as to what I can draw, so I decided to create two very simple pastel pieces. One is a mountain landscape with an orange-toned sunset, and the other of a city with a more blue/purple/pink sky. From these pieces with pastels, I was able to test out different methods of blending the colors smoothly, which I tried with my hand, a tissue, the pastel itself, and more. As seen in the piece of the mountain range, the blending of the colors in the sky is smoother, as I used a thick layer of the pastel making it easier to spread around. With these tips and tests of techniques and methods, I am able to keep this in mind for projects in my DP Art course. For instance, I enjoyed using and trying out pastels, which is a medium I am not very familiar with, but after this testing, I feel that I want to try using this in one of my future art pieces for the course.

Not only have I tested out the art medium of pastels, but I also tried out new techniques with watercolors. Firstly, I tested out blending watercolors smoothly using different brushes and colors, such as wet-on-wet watercolor painting, using a dry brush, or layering the watercolors to blend the colors, etc. Furthermore, as a collaborative project, alongside a couple more peers who are in this same club, we decided to try and create a ‘spray’ effect using watercolor. We tried this out by creating a liquid solution of 3 different colored paints and putting them into 3 different spray bottles. Firstly, before we even began trying to spray the paint, one of the bottles failed by shooting and squirting the paint upwards from the top of the bottle, rather than the spray, which ended up with a mess, but thankfully we decided to do this activity outdoors on the field. Therefore that meant we had to use 2 of the colors, which ended up creating a nice dotted sprayed effect onto the paper. However, instead of leaving the paint to dry for longer, we picked it up too early which caused it to drip down the sides, which at first we saw as a mistake, but ended up creating a cool effect too, as seen below.

This spray-dotted effect that we created can once again help us for future art projects, such as if we had the intentions of stars in the sky, textures, etc, and was a good learning experience to collaborate with others, as well as helped me with exploring different media techniques.