wednesday

I started my day off right, with a little wind and a little rain at about 50 degrees. We were outside the sculpture lab, clear at the other end of campus from where I'd regrettably parked my car - probably a twenty or twenty-five minute walk away.

Mr. Teacher Man told us to paint something we wouldn't normally paint - something ugly. I started sketching this little red shoddy looking Toyota pick up truck. My sketches were coming out great and I was ready to start painting when the owner came out of the building and drove away. I picked up my stuff from the middle of the small dirt parking lot and stood on the cement patio by Mr. Teacher Man. I had no clue what to do now.

There was a rickety old shack, but I like to paint rickety old shacks, so that was out of the question. There was an ugly sort of square metal cube sculpture that could be quite interesting, but one of my classmates was directly in front of it. And there was a giant red billboard way across the field by Jackson St. I opted for the enormous advertisement. If billboards are one thing, it's an eyesore. They wreck perfectly good scenery with bright colors and larger then life images. Mr. Teacher Man hates them, and since I was mostly at a loss for good ideas, he told me to paint the billboard.

I like the green grass on the right side of the picture, and the way the darker dips down into the lighter grass to give it a little bit more of a pop forward in the picture. And I'm totally digging the power lines. Love them. I had a lot of issues with the billboard though, mostly I struggled to get the perspective right.

Perspective is a tricky little snot. You don't realize how important it is until some part of it has gone awry. At first my billboard was backwards. The perspective and angles of the edges didn't flow with the rest of the picture, so I had to fix it. The billboard in my painting is actually a mirror of the billboard in real life, but it works.

This is what I painted after I got tired of messing with the billboard. I love mostly everything about this painting, actually. Mr. Teacher Man gave me some dun dun da Super Gouache! to use on the branches to make them just pop a little bit more.

And then it started to sprinkle and it ruined the nice smooth colors I had going on with little splashes of water. They're especially prominent in the lower half of the painting. But whatever. You know. It's cool. I suppose.

Know what else is cool? Bathroom pictures. Yeah that's right, I went there.