Last Painting & Last Blog Post!

 

I have just begun my last two paintings right as we come to the end of our blog assignment for MTG 391. While I do not plan on continuing to post my progress on the this last project, the photo above shows my progress up until this point. Much of the underpainting is still visible and I have just begun to lay out colors and build depth.  I decided to go with a yellow underpainting for this one because I thought it would give a beautiful sunny glow to the colors I put on top. 

I really struggled to come up with a subject for these last two paintings. I am graduating in May and am beginning to feel very nostalgic about my time at Bradley. While every moment of my time here may have not been pleasant, I have come to really feel at home here and have mixed feelings about leaving. Once we started to get our first few warm days here in Peoria, I really appreciated how sunny our apartment was and had taken a few photos. I decided to base my paintings off of these photos (the first will be a vase of daffodils on my desk and the second is a little table I put in our living room window nook on a particularly sunny day). I am altering each of these settings to be a bit more ideal looking than the original photos. This is mainly for the technical purposes of making a more interesting composition, but it also feels symbolic to me because as I get ready to leave Bradley, I do not really think about all the struggles and sleepless nights I went through. I mostly thing of all the happy memories I made while I was here. Some people say that bad memories are the ones that stick out the most, but I am really happy that when I think back to my time here, I mostly think of all the fun moments I had despite the challenges I had to overcome. I wanted these paintings to feel nostalgic and hopeful at the same time, and I think that the setting in my student apartment achieves the nostalgia aspect, and the way I intend to use light moving forward with this piece will hopefully convey some hopefulness. I do not where I am going, or where I will end up when I graduate, but I know that I will have no trouble finding things to hang on the walls of my new home when my painting journey here comes to an end.