Milk Cloth Painting

In art class we have been working on our milk cloth paintings.  This may sound weird, but the milk actually makes the cloth a nice texture.  It makes our paintings look very nice.  First we dipped the cloth in the milk.  Then we set it on a sheet of paper and we used our pastels to draw our pictures.  When you draw the picture on the cloth it makes it look very nice and when you take the cloth off it makes a really nice painting on the sheet of paper under it.  We based our milk cloth painting on some natural pictures that we took.  I based my milk cloth on some leaves in our school area outside of our classrooms.  My painting was Post Impressionist.  The reason why my milk cloth painting is Post Impressionist is because it had very visible brush strokes and it didn't look very realistic.  The one thing that was challenging for me during this project was just drawing the picture with lots of detail.  The details on the real picture were very complicated and small, but we were using pastels which made it harder to make small details with normal pastels.  I think the most successful thing I did in this project was making my painting look very Post Impressionist.  You could easily see that my painting was Post Impressionist because of all of the thick brush strokes and it didn't look very realistic.  If I could change a couple things during this project I would make a more detailed sketch before I drew the picture on the milk cloth.  I did draw a sketch before I made the milk cloth, but it wasn't a very good sketch, so next time if I make a milk cloth painting it will help if I make more of a detailed sketch before I make the milk cloth painting.

This is my milk cloth painting