For my second Genius Hour Project I decide to research famous impressionists painters and practice impressionism for myself, accept instead of using oil paint like most famous painters I used acrylic paint. I mainly chose this topic because I was learning a lot about painting in my art class but I wanted to make more than just one painting than what we were doing in class. So for this project i decided that for three of the painting I would try and imitate or copy three famous paintings.

The three paintings I copied/imitated were: Starry Night by Van Gogh, Le jardin de l’artiste à Giverny by Monet, and Tilting Dancer by Degas. Before I started painting them I thought that they would be relatively easy to do and that mixing the paint was going to take the most amount of time, but I came to realize that that was far from true. It took about two and a half hours to five hours to complete one of the paintings, but that is what I should have expected since it wasn’t my original work. Although I am very happy with my results:

            

After making these paintings I realized that there are many different ways to manipulate the paint on your brush to get all these different effects. Also, I learned several ways of mixing paint to get these beautiful colors that I had no idea I could recreate so easily. With all the things that I learned about painting and how to use all the equipment I finally made my original pieces using impressionism and also made a painting of what I usually draw:

Usually I make more abstract Art like Zentangle.

Although my second Genius hour didn’t have a huge impact on the world it helped me take the time I needed to relax since I enjoy Art and it was more like a game than an assignment. This Genius Hour made me realize that this school year I have overloading myself with sports and that I need to have a better balance of school, sports, and personal time.

Also since our next Genius Hour project has have more of an impact on the world have been debating on weather or not I should do something that involves recycling in Dakar since it is a very large problem in the city and many neighborhoods. I figured this would also help me get, outside of school, community services hours.