October - Week 4

Written 07/11/2025

Final piece!

Still Life With Computers

An acrylic painting of a desk with two monitors and a laptop, there is a hill in the background of the window

The theme

The theme is one of finding beauty in something that is mundane to me and in finding a new perspective on something that I use every day :)

Thoughts on the process

Before discussing the process, I did want to shout out my art teacher for recommending the narrower canvas for this painting. I had intially intended on an A2 size canvas (like I used for my January and June final pieces) but she said that with the subject I wanted to paint (I showed her the photo) she said a narrower one would work better for the composition. And she was right! I could have added more 'height' by including more of the desk but I'm glad I didn't and that the focus of the piece is squarely on the monitors and laptop.

That out of the way, I feel like this took way too long. Mainly due to procrastination rather than the painting taking a particularly long time. I will admit, this was partly due to doing other art outside of this project - I designed a poster for my local community for a Christmas event which took some time away, and I also did a week long fanart challenge on Tumblr (that is all I will say in that here!) so that all took away from this challenge (I may have also bought the new Pokemon game and played that a bunch XD).

Once I realised that the month was coming to a close, I did manage to knuckle down and get some painting done. On Halloween night I spent several hours painting, and then over the following days I hard focused on getting this done. I am happy it is finished now but I know that I could have prioritised my time better.

The actual painting process was pretty good though! I really tried to think about the lighting and the shading. I noticed how in the photo I used, there were blue highlights so I added blue spots to the black desk to show that. I did struggle with all of the black though, so I feel like I 'cheated' a little and added a little 'halo' effect so that the keyboard and bottom of the monitors could be discerned in an un-natural way. At a glance it works though!

The progression can be seenHERE

Comparison with inspiration

An acrylic painting of a desk with two monitors and a laptop, there is a hill in the background of the window
An oil painting of a desk with a book wih glasses on top of it, several bottle of wine with two glasses - one empty, one full , two apples, some books and a small painting within the painting of a still life with a vase and two apples

As you can see, these are rather different! In my piece, there is far more 'light' so it looks brighter. I didn't manage to get a reflective look like Toni Ebel did but I am happy that did manage to get at least some shading. One do feel like my lighting and shading looks a bit 'messy' though, I was trying to only apply small amounts at a time so my paintbrush was rather dry so the edges were sumbled rather than being smooth.

I will also admit that some of the shading was with a watered down grey paint rather than mixing a darker colour of the wall simply because it was the last thing I did and I was already behind. While I think it looks fine, I know it would have looked better had I taken the effort to mix a proper colour.

I don't think to someone who didn't see them side by side the homage is clear at all, they are both still life paintings of a desk. That isn't a bad thing per se but it did make me think how I feel like I focused too much on the things I was painting and less on HOW, since I didn't think to apply the thicker, visible brushstrokes that she did.