Whenever you paint, you always want to make it look realistic with the same color as you may observe it. However, you don’t need to do that when you are painting portraits. Instead, you can choose different colors. Either way, you will get the same results if you make sure you are following the light. That is because of one thing – “VALUE”. Value is the tone of a color. For example, yellow has a light tone. Just like my self-portrait painting. As you could see, I did not use skin colors, but I still made it look realistic. The rule is “It does not matter what color you use as long as you the VALUE is right.” For example, you can use orange color for the regular skin of the person on portrait and blue color for the folds and still the portrait will look natural and artistic even though these are not the normal skin colors. This is because VALUE. So next time you make a portrait, think about different VALUES or tones of the colors. You never know when this might come in handy!

During my third art lesson, I learn’t a few more techniques to do the painting. Most of them had to do with how to show reflection. They are as follows:

1. When you are doing the reflection, an easy way to do it would be to flip over the painting. In that way, it will be like you are just doing the whole thing over again.
2. When you are doing the shading and you have straight lines, an easy way to make it look natural is by cleaning off your brush completely and just swirl your paint brush through the color lines, but don’t go too crazy on in or it will get too swirled and not natural.
3. When you are painting a river/ocean, if you make the river/ocean too blue, and you want to make it lighter, don’t take blue and white and put it on top of the blue. If you do that, it might just blend inside the blue and might become darker. Instead, what you should do it just take some white and swirl it and make big strokes on the blue. That way, it will become lighter.

On December 5th, 2013, I got a chance to join a few students and staff from my school to attend a band orchestra called “‘Tis the Season… Symphony & Song!”. It was an amazing experience for me since this was first time that I went for a musical band. It was at Quincy High School in the Lloyd Hill Performing Arts Center. All the participating schools sat on the balcony and watched the show while everyone else who came were sitting on the bottom floor. There were many instruments in the show like French Horns, Tuba’s, Drums, Violins and Clarinets. I liked the Clarinets the most of all. The other fun fact is that I take Clarinet lessons every Thursday at my school. I was mostly focusing on the conductor because he was jumping around, waving his baton and he was acting funny. Then after the few songs there was an intermission. After the intermission, it all continued. Towards the end of the concert, they played 8 songs for which they had given us the lyrics and together we sing-along. It went on for about 2 hours and it ended at 9:30PM and we got back to school in less than 10 minutes.

I am very thankful that all the staff (Mr. Nicholas Ahearn, Principal, my class teacher Ms. Errichiello, other teachers from the school and the administrative staff) in the Clifford Marshall School as took time to take us to this event and made it a great success. The students were sponsored for tickets as well as Pizza dinner. It was a wonderful evening and I will always remember it.

Light and Shading Effect using colors:
When painting large objects, giving light effects is easy. However, it is tricky to paint thinner objects and show light and shading effects. To make the shades from light to dark, you should paint using a brush – line by line. But, if you paint using this line method, you can end up making the thin object very large if the lines are very thick. Here is a tip. What you can do instead is make a thin line with the brush. The next line should be thin and kind of overlap on the earlier line. Make sure that the new color and old color both can be seen. Repeat this with lighter color shades till you finish painting the object. In this way you can give light effects to even thinner objects. You should remember that the colors you use are either going from light shade to dark or dark shade to light, but do not mix the pattern.

I and my family wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving and a great family dinner tonight. Hope all of you have a great holiday season ahead.

I learnt a few sketching tips while starting a scenery painting that I want to share:

1. The time to finish the painting depends on the number of objects in the painting.
2. The trees are usually fat at the bottom and skinny at the top.
3. The trees and swans should be of different sizes and it will depend on their distance shown in the picture.
4. In a painting, the size of the objects should be realistic. The size of the reflection of an object depends on the size of the object and it should be similar in size and shape, but opposite of each other.

This was a few weeks ago at my school on a Tuesday. In our Social Studies class, instead of reading and writing in our notebooks, we decided that we would make our own landforms. A landform is one of the many forms of land. For example, a volcano and a mountain are both landforms. Almost everyone made a volcano because it was the easiest one. But I made an island. First, I sketched how I wanted it in my notebook. Next, I made it using clay. Then I made a pond in the middle, attached a stream that goes to sea, three little palm trees, a boat and a paddle. Finally, I painted everything – even the boat and the ocean. I used dark brown shade for the palm tree trunk and the boat. I used nice light green color for leaves. I used a deep blue for the ocean. Then, in the end, I added some white to the brown and used this light brown for the land. The white colors look like beaches. If you look closely, it looks like a donut! Hence I named it as “DONUT ISLAND”!

To my surprise, my uncle (Reji) and aunt (Sonali) told me that there actually exists such a donut shaped island in Philippines. Read this blog to see the real world donut islands.

Many artists paint outside and inside. However getting paint on your hands and face is common for most artists. It might take lots of time and soap to clean it. But there is one simple trick to get paint off your face and hands in just a few seconds. Using Vaseline or baby oil not only wipes the paint, but also protects your skin. Most paint removers are expensive and may be unaffordable. But Vaseline or baby oil is simple and inexpensive. As soon as paint gets on your hand, take the Vaseline or baby oil and put it on your skin and rub until the paint is invisible. Finally take a paper towel or cloth and wipe your hand. Repeat till the paint comes out. Thank you for reading!

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Thank You!