Moonshinin’ Time

The moonshining project stemmed from a project where the class voted on a time period in which everyone would make either a character, environment, or a vehicle (or all of them) of that time period. To begin the moonshine project, I had particular interest in the environment and the characters side of the project so I created mood boards on what I was could use for my painting. I looked into the hillbilly fashion, horses and 1920s police officers in America.

Hillbillys

1920s Policemen

Horses!

I followed on to watching a documentary I found whilst researching. The documentary was on an interesting fella known as ‘Popcorn Sutton’. He was one of the last original moonshiners and it was on his last ever moonshining, talking about the processes he had to go through to create good moonshine.

                                                             Interesting guy indeed.

Once I have gathered enough to understand what I want in my painting, I started to work out the composition I wanted to have. I went for a composition in which we are looking up slightly at the character on a horse.

I made the character have a banjo to add to his characteristics. I found that looking up at the character would make him a little more heroic which was something I wasn’t planning on doing; and so I heightened the composition in which made him a little more equal with the viewer.

I wanted to add a few more elements to the picture as well to make it a little more interesting by adding in silhouettes to differentiate a foreground to the middle ground. I added in leaves to show wind blowing from behind the moonshiner. I also wanted to add a little mysteriousness to the character so I dipped his hat slightly to cover his facial features in slight darkness.

At the end I played around with a few textures and really like the effect of overlaying fabric onto the image to give it a slight canvas picture look.