ANNUAL STUDENT COMPETITION
section-by-section to focus
on details; continual layering
and burnishing of the color
helped to bring out an overall
heightened tonality. The white
highlights can be attributed
to the use of a Gelly Roll
pen, which stuck to the waxy
colored surface quite well.
An underlayer of black ink
created the opaque black
background. I used a Faber
Castell India Ink marker, and
then a black colored pencil
fi nish. The piece all in all took
around 120 hours.
Overcoming anxiety and
artistic insecurity inspired
Sterile. I wanted to translate
that moment of clarity, a
transient instance of “eureka”
through the use of the human
fi gure. The water in this piece
represents a suffocating
thought, a repressive bar-
rier from which one emerges,
valiant and assured. MW
TOP LEFT: Sterile (colored pencil
on bristol paper, 16x20)Third Place
Oscar Lopez
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
ARTBYOSCARLOPEZ.COMI began About To with small
sketches to determine
the composition and then
transferred the drawings to
canvas with charcoal. I did
two underpaintings, the fi rst
with umbers to establish the
light and shadow patterns.
The second underpainting
was red and green—red for
the light side and green for
the shadows. I then worked
on the focal point—the left
eye—and moved from the
light side toward the shadow
side. I worked slowly since
the values were really close
in the light and shadow areas.
This took me about a month
and a half to complete. MW
BOTTOM LEFT: About To (oil on
canvas, 16x20)68 artistsmagazine.com
64_tam1216Students.indd 68 9/22/16 2:24 PM