Project 10: Santa Cruz

Over the summer I went to Europe with my brother and grandparents. I'm part Portuguese, my grandparents lived most of their life in portugal and my mother was born there, so of course I needed to see Portugal! To be honest...my first view of europe, Lisboa (Portugal's capital), was very disappointing. I had expected Europe to be drastically different than the US, which it really wasn't. A city is a city no matter where you go. I was hoping for a awesome vacation but after seeing the crowded and crazy city and my grandparents...lets say...older...house, I lost any excitement I had when it came to Portugal. That was until I saw Santa Cruz. The beach is 5 minutes away from my grandparent's vacation home so that was the first real place we visited. The water was gorgeous and the natural rock formation was surreal, it was the first thing that made me feel at home in Portugal. So this was my subject matter for my project.

We are required to make a water soluable oil painting for Art 4. The class started this project all at the same time though normally we are all on completely different things. When we first started practicing with the colors it was terrible. I made a muddy color that I hated and I was just not happy with the medium. It smells and takes forever to dry. But, I grew to not actually mind it. Beginning this project was daunting because of the medium but also because it was a landscape. Mrs Rossi (who uses this medium a lot) suggested I make a landscape which is why I did, but normally I hate landscapes. They require a large amount of detail and time and I am normally very uninterested in creating a landscape artwork. However, the medium allows you to create detail without spending too much time on it, so it was actually sort of enjoyable. I started my project by outlining my picture on canvas and putting a blue watered down acrylic as the base. I started on the sky and big rock first:

Mrs Rossi told me to use the medium value first before doing highlights and shadows, a technique that does work better than whatever I was doing. I find that these paints work best with layering. It took a lot of blending and layering and mixing colors and time but...

Overall I love it and I'm super happy with the results especially since I've never really used the medium and I don't really do landscapes. If I were to do it again I would do the background first and make a yellow base color for the bottom half of the painting...but still super happy with this!