WEEK 5

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The Koru was a significant element that I thought about a lot when planning and designing the painting. I wanted to put something on the canvas that represented my culture, my home and myself. The Koru as most people in New Zealand know, is a native symbol for our country and our people and when I was drawing up the first initial sketch, I wanted it to fill up a large part of the painting (the bottom right corner). 

 

In the video above you can see that I started with a light green base layer. At first this part was quite tricky because I couldn't go over the lines or else I'd lose the illusion of the koru looking 3d and jumping out of the page and instead becoming monotone, so i had to carefully go as close as possible to the edges. The next step was to start adding depth to the flat image through the use of mixing similar colours and creating lighter and darker values, which I had to repeat and recreate 6 times for each of the koru's coiled fronds. 

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The first frond probably took the longest because I had to go over and over again with new layers to consider multiple factors to see how effective could I make it look, such as; where should the darkest points be? Where should the lightest points be? How do I blend each frond into the koru's base? Should I start off light and work darker towards the spiral? etc... 

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After playing around and experimenting with these factors, the first coil was finished and I had template for the other five! But now, I just had to repeat that process which I wasn't looking forward to do. The 2nd and 3rd coils that I did were actually quite difficult, there was something wrong with them and I just couldn't seem to get them right. However, after taking a break and leaving it to sit for a day or two, I came back and finished it off.  Surprisingly, it ended up coming together quite nicely, and so following finishing off those 2 coils, I proceeded onto the last 2 and then the centre one.

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I think that the painting is coming along nicely, however at a very slow rate due to uni and work both building up on top of me... I'm starting to think if I am going to finish this in time.

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