Plain for Pain

Oct 2020

Oil on Canvas, 250mm X 250mm

On this painting, I used the characteristic of the oil painting as a tool to make my painting look good. I firstly added the bottom layer, instead of drawing the shape of the mouth, I created multiple areas of colours and the shape of the mouth was created via colours. Oil can be built up with layers, so I started adding layers of colour on the painting, which drew the mouth without a single line but with a lot of shadows. In this way, I created a lot of different colour areas on the lips, and the highlights and the shadows on the top lip made the painting look more real and impressive. With the advantages of this technique, I think the mouth looks really great.

I choose the colour of grey, as well as some white and black, to represent the extreme sadness, because for me, the feeling of sadness can be expressed as no emotion or no colour. To present the extreme sadness, the mouth pointing downwards is definitely not enough, so I came p with the idea of grey, which stands for plain and means nothing. When one's face was void of emotion, it can better represent the mood of sadness. And using other colours to drew the mouth would not be as good as using grey since the mouth has many shadow and highlights which could be kind of hard to deal with using colours like green or blue.

This painting was edited after I thought it was finished. However, I didn't include the nose in the previous version which makes this painting look a bit unnatural and weird. Instead of drawing the nose, I added the shadow of the nose in the artwork which keep the sadness presented by the mouth in the main focus as well as keeping the painting a stronger visual effect.