Reflecting on my travels through the valley in the shadow of death, the stark eerie white trees rising out of the water resilient through fire and flood. Through reflection, I can look towards the lighthouse, towards hope in Jesus Christ, my saviour.
The inspiration
I recall the joy of our first 4wd camping trip, looking forward to finally driving on the sand and my husband did not want me painting in his new car. I was constrained to sketching and taking lots of photos on my phone and was surprised to have captured the reflection of the landscape past in the rearview mirror and the back door. A reflection of a reflection of a reflection. What a perfect way to illustrate the past, present and future.
In our travels we have seen such a variety of landscapes and the most striking and eerie was the beautiful white trees rising out of the pale blue water against the lush green bush of the hinterland. What was most astonishing was the trees did not have any leaves, well not the noticeably green leaves the other surrounding trees had. They were just long white sticks standing so elegant in the light. I mused they must have survived a bush fire but it was curious they were not black with charcoal like the other trees we passed. I guess the bark must have burnt and fallen off.
Moments after we saw some cars lined up and there was a bush fire on the side of the road. They seemed to have it under control but in my mind this felt symbolic of past sufferings, resilience.
The Process
One of my goals this year is to paint every day and to do more big paintings. It’s been a busy and big year and I finally found the time to focus on a larger painting.
This is still a hobby for me I just paint because I love the process of painting, it brings me joy and I like my day job. But recently working on a series Jesus is risen! Happy easter with my first themed series of paintings helped me see the value in having a theme or a deadline that a competition provides.
Given the recent negative reactions to the Archibald, I’m not sure I want to or am yet ready to enter that world. But there’s nothing like having a competition deadline to help focus your energies to finish something. I guess this is why people enter marathons.
Planning with AI
Given this was my first time entering an art competition, I’ve only been lurking on the art forums and not really involved in a watercolour society and really just looking to use the competition deadline to motivate me to finish something.
I used Chat GPT in the planning process to…
- to give me a table of competitions (cheap/free) in my area worth entering, deadlines, requirements, fees, etc. It was great at identifying the styles of paintings that are more favoured for the different types of competitions. A lot of the information it gave me was too summarised or incorrect ie a few competitions it said I had time to enter but I had already missed the submission date. Definitely need to review and double check the information. And the ones it chose had a entry free of $50!
- create an artist bio – based on this blog. This was pretty impressive but I had to keep prompting it to reword it. In the end I used it as a draft, rewrote it and asked for input but still had to touch it up in the end.
- refine my artist statement – I wrote a draft and it rewrote it in ‘artist language’ which while it was great to do it so quickly and saved a lot of time as I’ve never read an artist statement let alone written one so it gave me the sense of style. However, I still was not impressed with AI as it kept missing the intent.
- It suggest a limited colour palette to use which I used as a suggestion – most fo the colours I use anyway. But this process helped me to refine my thinking and composition. I also did some thumbnail paintings to test out the different compositions and colours to refine my limited colour palette.
- I also asked it to help me break down the process and create an ICS calendar to timebox time in my calendar so that I would be to finish the painting in time. It also gave me instructions on how to add it to my google calendar. However I must have disabled the download setting so had to ask it to give me the text to copy an paste it into notepad and save it in the correct format. In the end I didn’t use this but having it as part of the planning process it was in the back of my mind when I needed to do what. In God’s providence ended up with a day off and space in my calendar between errands to finish it. In my mind it was just a goal to work towards helped me to prioritise and commit to spending time to finish it.
A lot of the AI use was just speeding up the process and it was a bit hit and miss. It was good for a quick rough analysis and faster at creating different formats but not a precise communication of intent.
The painting
One of the things I wanted to improve was perspective, proportion and scale. For this painting I employed a lot of different techniques I haven’t used in my smaller quick paintings:
- OneNote to keep a list of pictures that i was looking at to quickly move to reference the different photos – as this was a compilation of about 10 photos.
- A grid – I just drew it with shapes on OneNote, but for my next one will look at a programe to add grid lines to the photo so that I could sketch first
- Tested out the pencils I would use on the same type of arches paper and rubbed them out to choose the one that would rub out the best without leaving a mark. My previous painting I found it left a mark and didn’t rub out on certain paper.
- Thumbnail sketch for different compositions
- this was useful for testing out the masking fluid
- paint colours
- painting technique
- Using a ruler and drawing to scale – it took a few days to get this right as it wasn’t quite in proportion but took the time to get it right from the start. I actually used a ruler to mark the grid lines (not completely just light dots) to help with the proportions.
- Masking fluid with wet on wet blooms- I have used masking fluid before but this is the first time I managed to soften the edges using a wet on wet technique, painting water on the edge and allowing the additional paint colour to bleed into the edge to disappear. This too way longer than it would have been to do it direct, I will try it next time without using masking fluid. I also levelled up worked out how to hold two brushes in the one hand one for the clean water and the other with the paint, it was much faster than swapping brushes.
All up it was probably approx 20 hours of planning, painting plus 5 more for framing, taking photos and writing this blog post.
Overall I was happy to have finished it in time.
On the day it was due I read the competition fine print, and found I can I can actually enter up to 5 artworks for the same $50 fee. Also if I were to win there would be strings attached. I noticed all the things I would do better, including finding a frame that fit the paper.
So I have decided I’ll redo it for next year maybe with even larger paper (just bought some Arches sheets with deckled edges 56x76cm!) and instead focus on building up a body of work which I may or may not enter.
But none of that matters because not only have I learnt a lot, we now have a new painting for the wall that I like but is also deeply personal and inspirational.
Rachel Fong Art 