THIRD REFINEMENT

---Materials: a crafting knife, Pages from sketchbook, a cutting mat, a sponge, a paint brush, blue acrylic, white acrylic, black acrylic and stencils of the buildings I cut out.

>My aim today, in the refinement, is to lay out my technique in a different way to what I have been doing in my other refinement. How am I going to do this? I am going to use the stencils of the buildings I have been cutting out throughout my pieces and lay them out unto the buildings I have just cut out in my sketchbook page.  

This time, I added less paint on the background in order to make the buildings visible. I started dipping the sponge carefully into water before applying it onto the paper as I did not wanted the piece of paper to crease. I then placed the stencils over the three pages of cut out buildings and on top of the background. After this stage, I used a paint brush for my technique and painted onto the stencil which created an outline of buildings. I used a lot of blue paint before applying white paint on top of the blue paint as I wanted the stencil to stand out. After doing the same thing to all of the other stencils, I started using a sponge to dab the outlines of the buildings by means of blending the colours together with the background.  Learning from my second refinement, I added a little black unto the abstract to create an emphasis on the blue and white abstract.

My idea of adding the stencils unto the buildings I had just cut out was a great idea but made the painting over-crowded and so it was hard to interpret. Using the stencils made the building camouflaged because I put it on the edge of buildings and so you could not to see the outline of the buildings or the skyline which was amazing- however this made the piece look over crowded. I preferred it when the abstract was on top of the buildings than now where a building is created by my abstract and is put over another building. When creating the piece, I realized how hard it was to figure out where to put the stencils because if I overlaid stencils over other stencils you would not be able to see the buildings but just random abstracts obstructing the view. This meant that I had to put the stencils around the piece which I thought made it look vague. For my next refinement, I am going to use my technique in random areas and try making it expressive (painting freestyle). Learning from this refinement, I noticed that the black helped to emphasise the blue and white techniques I created. To improve my piece, I will add white unto darker tones (like black) into the abstract so that it looks more mystical- relating to mental imagery; thinking about a memory is quite mystical to me as you are creating an image in your mind that is not precise and not always close to reality.