My inspiration

Art works its way into our lives unnoticed. Whether it is in the architecture of a building, a gleaming sports car or a wall painting, it is inherently present. The media I enjoy painting the most with is Acrylic as it gives a glossy and reflective feel to the painting. Reflections are a great way to exercise your ability to give volume to a shiny object which therefore has become the subject of my drawings as is my enthusiasm for cars.

The Reflections

In this section I have all the various acrylic paintings of the cars and other reflective objects that I have drawn.

One of my first attempts at trying out reflections was this painting. The cars reflections of the background were not clearly reflected but the overall combination of both the items being in the painting was a challenge. I tried two different styles for the background and for the reflections.

The above picture I drew from a car magazine of Gordon Murray's Mclaren F1, was focused solely on the subject, the car, with no background. Again the reflections were not very detailed as there was no background to reflect. This was more an exercise of light refractions and scattering rather than pure volume. The method of juxtaposing the car in a thick black background highlights and draws attention to it.

This is another painting exercising much the same aspects as the Mclaren above, Shiny subject in a dark background. However the difference here is that the car experiences much stronger directional lighting from the left as opposed to the more ambient lighting the painting above creates.

Finally, this painting I wanted to juxtapose the contrast of rough and varied textures with the sublime curves of the cars reflections. The fence in the background provides a perfect subject for the metal to manifest a reflection.

Reflections, Refractions And Scattering

This was significantly more demanding than pure reflections. Glass for example passes light through by scattering it some reflect and others refract due to the different refractive index between air and glass. This possess a real challenge to paint because of the intricacies in detail present.

As you can see, the glass refracts scenery behind so it appears in a different location to what the brain expects. This coupled with the fact that the image is distorted due to the volume shape of glass holder posed a difficult challenge to draw for me and also took the longest, about one and a half days. The horse statue that I drew also has reflections, albeit they are more diffused and blurry.