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| A page from Colorscape |
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| Live saving book! |
We pick up where we left off last time and now turn to color picking, color mixing, and painting the painting. Color is critical to my work so I spend lots of time deciding on color palettes for my paintings. I love bright, saturated colors but use more muted tones in my work to create a more quiet mood. One of my favorite resources that I use is a book called
Colorscape, which groups colors into categories like: Music, Lakes and Rivers, Spring and Summer, Cooking and Seasoning as well as by country. I'll usually have an idea of what color family I want to focus on and then look at this book to find just the right hue.
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| Obsessive color mixing |
Once I find the hue that I want, I get to mixing the paint. As you can see from this picture (right), color mixing involves a lot of trial and error. I first have to find my primary hue and then see how it works as a desaturated tint. Then I make a test color study on gessoed canvas. I don't have the patience to make a smaller practice painting before committing to the final painting so I just cross my fingers and hope for the best!
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| Painting in progress |
I've recently embraced "painting by numbers," meaning that I plan out the colors and assign them each a number. I then write numbers on my blown up sketch and follow it as I paint. It is much easier than looking at my reference photo and trying to
figure out if an area is a "4" or a "3." I know that it sounds
complicated but it has really simplified things for me.
After countless hours, the painting is complete! Here it is:
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| Rising, 2015 |
