- Sticky Situation -
For this project, our theme, or main idea was "Sticky Situation". This could be any thing we thought was a sticky situation, such as things like tape or spider webs to things like a real life situation that you're facing. My first ideas for Sticky Situation consisted mostly of honey, tape, gum, spider webs, things like that. However, I didn't want to paint or watercolor things like that, so I went online and was just looking of sticky animals and the first thing that came to mind was a tree frog because you always see pictures of them sticking to glass or trees and leaves. Then I had to figure out what i should do for the background because the frog obviously can't just be floating in the air. I thought about doing a forest in the background, but that would be way to much green if the frogs are greenh too, and it might look to busy since the main thing is supposed to be the frog. Then I thought well what if I did a wallpaper in the background and the frog could look as if it was eaither part of the wallpaper, or actually sitting ontop of the wallpaper (I still don't know).
Repition was also supposed to be a part of this project, so I just decided to do three frogs because it might help to balance out the picture better anyway. Then we had the choice of watercolor or acrylic. I'm not really comfortable with either because I have only used acrylic one other time before this, and I have never done a water color project (although I've attempted and it didn't turn out well,), but i decided to do acrylic, thinking a darker ,richer, frog might look nicer and more realistic with the whole wallpaper thing going on. A challenge with using the acrylic was colors. When you make a nice shade that your pretty happy with and you start using it, it runs out pretty quick. Then you have to sit there for 10 more minutes just trying to get the shade that matches the color that you previously used, like when I had to use the tape to make lines where I wanted the darker blue for my wallpaper background. When I went to peel the tape off, part of the paint came of with it so i had to go back over it, after of course, i made the color again. Another challenge that I faced was making the small outline details. With the brushes its harder to make the small then outlines that you want (even if you have the smallest brush ever made) and to make them stand out is even harder.
At the beginning of this project, we did mini lessons on all the different ways you can paint or use paint, and the ways you should be mixing colors if you want it to turn out the way that you initially intended. I think that these lessons were very benificial to me because I was very inexperienced when it comes to working with acrylic, and the water colors were deffinently out of my comfort zone, so these helped me to get used to using these supplies more. We also talked out how when your trying to make colors, you always mix the darker color onto the light, not the other way around. 1) because it takes less paint to get the shade that you want, and 2) because it helps to keep your pallet clearer so you have more room and don't mix colors that you were'nt trying to mix which was something that I really needed to know. All in all, this was a very fun project and I would deffinently do it again .
-Brooke Bramante
