Join us tomorrow, July 17, at 2 p.m. Eastern for our monthly YouTube Live Chat. The topic is Perspective without Rules.
I hope you enjoy this refurbished post from 2018.
I love doing discovery studies of small, found objects from direct observation. Here's one that I want to share with you again:
Step 1: I went outside and chose a small piece of tree bark from underneath a pine tree in my woods. Sometimes I choose a stone or some other natural object. I enjoy those whose local color is more neutral.
Here's a photo of my bark.
Step 2: I placed the bark under a swingarm lamp containing a 40-watt bulb, positioned about four feet away. I didn't want the light so bright that it would obscure the local color.
Step 3: Because of the bark's neutrality, I selected two complementary colors, blue and orange. For my blue, I used both ultramarine blue and thalo blue. For my orange, I used quinacridone burnt orange. (Burnt sienna or transparent oxide red would have worked, too)
Step 4: I squeezed a pile of each onto my palette, then into a portion of each, I added enough white to get a middle value of each color. (If I had been working in watercolor, I would have controlled my value with
water.)
Thalo Blue Ultramarine Blue Quinacridone Burnt Orange
Step 4: I played with some mixtures of the middle value of the two complements until I got a color that matched the local color of the bark as I saw it under that light.
Step 5: Now that I had enough information, I continued to look at the color and value variations and plot them on my canvas. I noticed that there was a lot of warm/cool creating the color, so I decided to push that relationship a bit by
making both warms and cools just a tad more saturated than I saw them, but I was careful to get the values I was seeing.
Here what I came up with.
Give an experience like this a try.
If you simply followed my process and had thoughts about it, it remains a philosophical conjecture, only information. But if you take yourself through the exercise, you will experience it. The neurons in your brain will make a new connection. If you repeat the experience several times, the connection will remain permanent and become a permanent part of your painter's brain.
It will be yours from now on.
Enjoy an exciting weekend of discovery!
During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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