For my third piece I was quite rushed which ended up with a product that I was disappointed in. After spending hours painting black and white, I wanted to again have color in my paintings. My third painting was based off of the background of my computer screen and my intent was for it to be a low hanging Japanese maple by a pond. The finished product resembles my goal, but I wish that I had allocated my time differently so that I could truly call it a “finished product”.

My second painting, or paintings depending upon how you look at them, were inspired by two things: my childhood (and yes, I know I’m still a kid) and my theme. When I was in elementary school, art was never one of my favorite classes because everything that I drew or painted or sculpted always took too long and never turned out how I wanted them to. Then we had a unit on Sumi Painting, an eastern Asian style of painting, and finally my paintings turned out the way I wanted them to. When I used Sumi paints in this project, I loved how fast they were to complete as well as the few fluid motions that starkly contrasted the repetitive tiny strokes in the second half of the triptych. For the other half of the painting I ditched brushes and instead sharpened small branches and used them as my paintbrushes. This time consuming method of painting allowed me to paint the details that my small amount of Sumi painting skill didn’t let me achieve.

My first painting took me the longest of the three, yet it is by no means my favorite. My goal in the painting was to try and create an accurate looking tree in a landscape that was atypically simplistic, and idea I borrowed from another painting of a tree. The painting challenged me more than I thought it would and it showed me that maybe painting trees was a bit harder than laying down some brown lines and green dots.