Creating Girls Night – My Art Process – Acrylic Painting
Girls Night is an acrylic painting on a board. For this painting, I experimented with using different techniques such as limiting my color palette and glazing.
Ideas and Inspiration
For this piece, I knew that I wanted to make a painting of my bedroom. This was a project for school, and the project was based on impressionist art. I picked this particular image because of the lighting because I noticed that many impressionist artworks were very focused on the lighting and how that made a space feel.
Painting
I started out by deciding to limit my color palette for this piece. I used only magenta, yellow, cyan, white, and a very small amount of black. I have found that using only a few colors can make a painting look very bright and it is easy to get saturated colors.
To start, I used an orange color as the base, which you can still see in some areas of the final painting. I then used another color to sketch out the composition. I used a lot of glazing for this in order to build up those colors. This also allowed for the lighting to look real, not like a thick layer of yellow paint to represent lighting. So, I started with very thin layers of paint to block out different parts of the room. I also didn’t use the exact color that I wanted the finished painting to be. For example, for the bench I used blue when blocking it in and creating the shadows but went back in later with a thin layer of magenta to create a more purple color.
If you are following a similar process, make sure to not add the details until the very end. They may end up being covered by all of the layers or you may mess up if you add the details too soon. After I added the details such as on the pillows, I went back in with the main color of the pillows so that it would look more seamless.
Reflection
This painting was really about experimenting and having fun for me. There wasn’t too much planning involved, either. It was just a nice way to capture how my bedroom looks in a way that I found very fun. This painting taught me that art doesn’t have to be that serious, and playing with new techniques or styles shouldn’t be scary- it should be fun!