Octopus Painting

The next project I am going to share with you is a painting of an octopus holding an umbrella. This is another project I made in my Science in Art class in high school. The purpose of this project was to use rubbing alcohol to turn the watercolor paint into dots. As you can see from my picture, the tentacles have the spots made from the rubbing alcohol. The idea of the painting is that the octopus is going deeper into the ocean and it turned the umbrella inside out.

The first thing I did was choose an image. This project was a little bit more difficult to choose an image for because it couldn’t be anything we wanted. It had to be something that we could reasonably use the rubbing alcohol with. We couldn’t just draw a person and put random spots everywhere. I chose an octopus because of the tentacles, and I chose to make it holding an umbrella to add interest to a regular old octopus painting.

As with all of our paintings, the next step is to draw the image. I had a limited amount of time to complete this project, so I drew this picture relatively quickly. Obviously, there are no reference pictures on the internet of a real octopus holding an umbrella, so I had to use my imagination a little bit. Next, here come my favorite part: the actual painting! First, I painted the octopus. I used the color yellow because yellow is my favorite color. I also mixed the yellow with a little bit of brown to add dimension to my octopus. To paint the umbrella, I painted most of it a regular red and then used a darker red where the folds in the umbrella would be.

The trick with the rubbing alcohol was that you had to put it on while the watercolor paint was still wet. To get my spots accurate, I dipped my paintbrush in the rubbing alcohol and then touched it to the paper. I think the spots turned out pretty cool! Science!

My least favorite part of this painting is the background. I just really did not blend it very well. Overall, I do like this painting a lot! Obviously I like it enough to put it on my blog!