This week’s painting was a gift for my partner as his birthday has just passed. Oftentimes, I like making art for gifts because the painting has a purpose and I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Painting for the sake of painting is hard because you have to first decide what you’re painting, then you have to take time out of your day to dedicate to that art (when I’m feeling lazy, I tend to choose to watch Netflix over painting haha). However, producing art for someone else provides you with inspiration and a “due date” of sorts. You must ask yourself: What does this person like? What are they interested in? When am I going to see them next to give them the painting? These questions give me direction as opposed to staring at a blank piece of paper and feeling increasingly lost.
So, I decided to go with a Halo-themed card. My partner adores playing video games of all kinds as well as the logistics behind video game design. Despite my lack of familiarity with most of his video game talk, my partner gets very excited to tell me all about new updates and releases. I began researching characters from Halo that I could potentially sketch and went to Pinterest to check out some fan art from other artists. Most of the video game-based art is largely digital art, but there were a few examples of traditional art that I pulled inspiration from. I found a beautiful acrylic Halo painting tutorial on a Youtube channel called Remesa Art which blew my mind, so I’ll link it down below:
I decided to include two characters in my painting, one representing myself and the other representing my partner. I also added flames and an explosion-style background using the “splatter technique”. This technique involves essentially soaking your paintbrush in your desired colour and flicking the bristles toward your page so that the surface gets covered in a random pattern of paint splotches. It was a very fun and slightly messy strategy. I loved that it added a bit of extra texture to the background. Overall, I’m very pleased with this week’s painting and my partner got a kick out of it too!
