ABO BLOK 3 – Susanna Vegter

Filter a photograph through painting

For this assignment i chose a picture that wasn’t too busy. I did this so i could apply the filters more easily.

My first step was to print this picture and literally paint over it

The left one is more a filter because it is still see-through and the right one is a pretty thick layer of paint. I realized that this wasn’t that smart and that i should just paint the photo 1:1. My goal was to paint the picture in a way that it’s still obvious what it is but but make the filter interesting enough to get a long look at it.

i put the photo in Photoshop to get a sense of what i wanted. This is the Mosaic filter which made me really excited.

I am actually really happy with the results. pic 1: the mosaic. pic 2: brush side to side. pic 3: only brush in rounds. pic 4: precise. pic 5: smush every colour in eachother. pic 6. dab on the little canvas.

In every painting i put the red dot (which is a translation to the person sitting) on the canvas for recognition. I am happy i tried different ways to show my handwriting. I would love to experiment with more colours next time and a bigger canvas!

Paint over pictures of your own

For this assignment i chose 5 pictures and double them to make it 10. The pictures i chose are all without people. I specifically chose these because my goal was to make the scenery more interesting.

In a couple photo’s i tried to adjust Gerard Richter’s style into the paint. I took a little cardboard and scraped it over the photo’s. In the blue metro picture i even crumbled up the photo with paint in it. I wanted to mess around with the feeling if i didn’t try to think about it too much. I wish i did more techniques and that’s something i want to improve. Look around more and see what objects i can use and what inspires me to experiment with. My goal was to make the scenery more interesting but it looks more like i just added a layer over it. The only ones that have this are the pink/yellow metro and the last church photo.

Paint over news painting

I bought two different news papers and cut out the photo’s that were interesting to me. I chose six images that all have people in it that want a ‘change’ in the world, whether that’s good or bad. My goal was to make it obvious what the protagonist is feeling. angry, sad, happy.

In the first pic there are two people in their 20s fighting with the police because they are not allowed to party in the park. Yellow is the color for knowledge, wisdom and maturity so i chose this because these people are the opposite of that. Photo 2 you can see a lot of people walking together towards something, these are a group of immigrants. I painted pink ‘clouds’ because the way i see it is that i hope they’re walking to a new and good life so they’re walking on a euphoric pink cloud. The 3rd pic is a protester, i painted furious fire around her. The 4th photo is of a political supporter that disagrees with the results of the elections, so i put a record player around her and people can see it both ways. The last one is a cop in Hong-Kong getting ready to fight. The red around him concludes the isolation that he may have felt, he was standing alone so i made that impression even bigger.

I am happy that i reached my goal. For improvement i want to try adding lines instead of only rough painting. I would absolutely love to experiment this on a bigger scale!!

Make a collage painting in large format

So first of all; I was not happy at all with my first painting and frankly a little dissapointed in myself. I know i’m not good at realistic painting and still tried to do that which resulted in me being not happy with it. In this process you will see 2 paintings because i made another one.

the first one :

The painting has a lot of lines. The gards have been painted rough in order for the eye to look at it longer. The poppies don’t even look like poppies because they’re yellow. I painted them yelow because i wanted to show a variation of colour. I brought back the mosaic to show what i have learned. I am not happy with this painting because it has hardly any layers. I tried fixing it with splashing grey paint over it but it didn’t help.

I wanted to improve myself by using the knowledge i know now what i wanted to do different. I was so upset that i started painting this one at 11pm at night.

i used big paint brushes, small ones and a sponge. This one looks more like a collage to me. It has more dept because of the white i used in places. I used the sponge to play around with the layers of the pigeon. With this painting i stopped overthinking. I didn’t question myself anymore and didn’t pressure myself to make the most beautiful painting. My goal was to make something interesting and something that has more depth and i’m happy for how it came out. Again a big improvement point is to look around more and look through my photo’s. Make a composition that is not perfect so i can let my imagination run.

Instagram painting filters

For this assignment i used paintings i already had and paint strokes i made on the spot!

Three of them made on the spot! my goal was to make something trippy, weird and scary.

For the last picture i turned my mosaic picture into a facemask. I added anothe pixelated painting as a plane to make a mosaic monster. My goal of making scary masks are succeeded i think and i am pretty happy about it. I would (and will) love to experiment with more tools and figure out how to move things or animate things.

Overall: I learned a lot about the mixture of analog and digital. I didn’t know it would be this inspiring to work with both media. as a wish for myself for next time i want to get out of my comfortzone even more than i did. other than that i had a lot of fun and i think that’s imortant too. I messed around with paint and different handwriting and i was finally zen when i did my second collage painting.