When reading this exercise, I realised I had already encountered this technique, and in partiicular, sgraffito and scratching. For the first two techniques of using a brush and then a palette knife, I wanted to create a simple composition with fruit and vegatables, and so for the first technique wit the brushes, I chose a pepper, nectarine and banana to recreate with thickly painted brush strokes. However, before painting anything, I produced a series of tonal studies and different arrangements of the objects in the composition using watercolour and white acrylic. By doing this, i opened up possible arrangements and was able to choose one which I thought worked well.
After choosing a composition I lightly coffee stained a cotton canvas to give a simple smooth background, that the rough strokes would contrast with and after that I lightly sketched the composition and painted a base colour of the fruit and vegetable to build upon. With continuous layers and brushstrokes I was able to create impressions of the brush marks and manipulate the acrylic whilst wet. Also I found it interesting to slightly blend the layers to slightly smooth some of the paint and blend the highlights and shadows with the overall subject. With the background, I don’t think that a plain smooth background works that well as the subject has a weight to it, and so I would like to work on this further and include more body around the fruit and vegetable.
The next technique in the exercise description was using a palette knife, which I didn’t have any experience with. For this I covered the entire canvas with burnt sienna in order to play with the smooth and rough textures a palette knife allowed and once again chose fruit as my subject. With my original thoughts I wanted to include an orange, nectarine, banana and grapes and whilst blocking in the colours i did not think that there would be any problems, but as I finished the nectarine, orange and banana, I noticed that a block of colour would not work with the grapes, seeing as there are individual and also transparent which would be difficult to recreate with such a strong and bold technique. With this in mind, I blocked out the two blocks of green and deep violet with the burnt sienna and have not yet decided what sort of fruit or vegetable I will replace the grapes with. However, even though this occurred, I thoroughly enjoyed this technique finding it much quicker to produce colours and blocks on the canvas.
The last technique is one that I had been familiar with a couple of years and enjoy creating. Sgraffito is something that I briefly covered in painting techniques whilst at sixth form college and so I already knew how to create the technique. With this in mind, I began by covering several pages in a sketchbook with three different colours that worked well together making sure the shades overlapped and blended. Once dried, I covered the entire page with one colour using a gel retarder to slow the drying time of the acrylic, and then proceeded to scratch and scrape the top layer with cut up credit cards, creating different marks and shapes that revealed the colours underneath. For myself, this is my favourite technique with the paint out of the three, creating layers and intrigue with different colours merged together, and spontaneous patterns and prints.
These techniques could have worked well in previous exercises and especially with the landscapes, creating natural surfaces and textures and adding additional body to subjects with a presence, such as a rock formation or water.
SOPHIE FAWCETT'S OCA LEARNING LOG 