Sunday, June 7, 2015

How'd You Do That? Part Two

A page from Colorscape
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.

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!

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:

Rising, 2015

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