Those who paint together, stay together.

There is nothing more daunting than been given a blank sheet of paper, and some materials and told to express yourself, and show you personality through your art. Imagine how scary it is being faced with four 10ft long rolls of blank paper and being asked to do the exact same thing.

To begin with drawing felt like a task; and what I was drawing didn't feel natural, it felt false or staged. But as time went on; the task became easier. Ideas flowed freely, and small patterns and sketches soon covered the sheets. As a group we managed to cover all the canvas we were supplied with. The result was an explosion of colour, different techniques and different artistic

 styles.   
We then had to learn to control this raw artwork into something cleaner, more precise and following some rules of composition. To do this, as a group, we got our heads together and chose the elements we found most interesting as individuals. We then took these elements and fitted them together into a composition we all agreed on. 
Using our terrible preliminary sketch as our basis, we set to work. Creating the background using pastel shades of blue, green and purple, giving an almost oriental feel to the piece to begin with. 


Soon large doses of black and orange were added to create contrasts between the background and the foreground.
This began to bring the piece to life. Although the piece was supposed to be abstract, the majority of the group agreed that the canvas needed to be b
based on something real and not be pure abstract. This lead us to look at work
by John Martin as his work shared many characteristics of ours such as the 
use of deep reds and oranges which 
were contrasted with the dark browns 
and blacks in the piece.





We liked the direction the work had taken and realise the piece resembled a forrest fire and so began to paint silhouetted trees on the skyline. The only issue we were having was that the work seemed to have lost its liveliness. There was no energy left in the painting, it felt flat. 
We injected some life back into it with the use of inks to lift the black colour and make it bolder, we also used white to create highlights on the trees, and splatters of yellow and red paint in the centre of the fire to give the feeling of loss of control over the blaze. The final touch was the use of a resist to place a moon in the top right hand corner of the piece, which brought the work together and balanced the composition perfectly. 

 The finished product was something to be proud of, and we all were. Although I found controlling the piece from the first sketches was a tough task, but one that was defiantly worth while.