Art has always been one of my passions. I particularly remember a piece in my third-grade art class that I had made when given the task of creating an art piece with concentric circles. I drew what I thought was the most beautiful kingdom of all with a princess, a prince, and even a peacock. This sparked my creative drive, and from this point, I had developed such a love for art and drawing. However, as I went from elementary to middle school and later on into high school, I had felt like I had lost some of the drive I once was abundant with. That is, until the summer of 2018.
My last summer holiday was one of my favorite ones in a while. I got to travel to New York and go to a Columbia Summer Program with one of my closest friends. I spent so much time eating, shopping, and just walking around the city enjoying myself, little did I know my experience here was also a turning point for me and art. I had been taking the class “Drawing: Eye and Idea” where I just planned to try and have fun with art once again. I was successful. This was the point where I felt like I wanted to do art more often, and I did.
In this summer course, I was introduced to a new medium, gouache. I had heard of gouache before, but I had never used it before. For the people who don’t know what gouache is, it is a paint that acts like acrylic paint when used without or with little water, and like a watercolor when used with water. Think of it as somewhat of a middle ground between the two. When I first used it, I was so interested in all of the different things I could do with it. This marks the first part of my art discovery (or a rediscovery?) series that I plan to continue to share with you readers as I discover/rediscover art with new experiences. Anyways, back to the gouache.
So, after we were introduced with the gouache, we were tasked to create a self-portrait of sorts, and we were encouraged to try new things. That leads me to my first piece, which is my first ever gouache piece, a self-portrait of me.
As you can see I had used very vibrant colors. I had wanted to experiment with the gouache and its application. I painted my face with bright, warm colors, and my hair with blues, and the background with a duller purple. I had aimed to create a piece that popped out to the viewer while also trying to have fun with it.
This next piece is not just gouache. This piece was our last big project of this class, and we were told to just try something interesting big and fun. After spending three weeks in this class using different mediums, I wanted to create something that took aspects from my whole time there. So I decided to create this.
This piece is of my dog. I chose to make it with the five different mediums we explored in this class: (from top left clockwise) graphite, ink, white on black, charcoal, and finally gouache. Similar to the last piece, I used very vibrant colors for the gouache section of this piece. I again just wanted to explore the capabilities and the application of the medium. As I said before these pieces were a turning point for my interest in art, and it was. However, there was another break from personal art projects that I had taken.
The ending of this break was around the fall of 2018 when I was inspired to paint. I had experimented with painting on a bottle just a couple weeks earlier, and I wasn’t satisfied with my results. I was longing for another bottle to paint, and lucky for me my dad had just finished a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. After I saw that it was empty, I took the bottle and cleaned it out to the best of my ability. I did not want the smell of that whiskey stinking up my room. As soon as I saw the bottle, I had an idea in my mind. This was the result.
While painting this piece I had a sort of message for the piece bubbling in my head. I wanted to show how alcohol can be good and bad. Although I’ve never even tried alcohol, I know that people tend to drink it to let loose and have fun. I tried to signify that with the yellow flowers. However, if used recklessly alcohol can be dangerous too, and I tried to signify that with the red underneath the yellow flowers. Sometimes people are so blinded with the fun that comes with alcohol that sometimes they might not see the possible danger from it.
Now, this leads me to my last gouache piece so far. It is yet again on another bottle, this time it in on a coffee drink bottle. For this piece, I wanted to try and play around with having paint inside the bottle just to see how it would turn out. So that led me to paint this:
I was very interested in having this type of nighttime pond with flowers image. In a later part in this series, you all will see that I keep on attempting to do this image again, as it is still a type of image I want to execute with better skill. That’s what this series is basically about. I am just constantly trying to improve and discover new mediums and skills to use in my art. I hope you all will continue experiencing this with me.
Thank you to our super talented Angelica for taking these pictures!
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