I spent the last few days doing some simple color mixing exercises to try and gain a better understanding of how the pigments I am using interact together. Nothing as elaborate as the color wheels at handprint.com (at least not yet anyway.)
I was looking at the painting I just did of Main Street Northampton and I really wasn’t happy with how the people had turned out. An I think I figured out why. When I first started the painting, I put in some simple 2 tone washes over the people (below top) and I really liked how that looked. But as I continued with the rest of the painting, I would go back to the people and I kept adding on top of what I had done with more and more paint until I had lost the fluidity of the first washes replaced with a muddiness (below bottom.)
Next time I work on some people in a scene like this I am going to try to avoid painting them until the end of the painting and then just put down one, two or three washes on them getting the values to work with the rest of the painting. That way they should maintain the lights, and not look too overworked. I think the bottom picture above might be more suitable for acrylics where I could keep building it up until I got things looking just right with the opaque paint.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: art, art theory, chris, cityscape, color mixing, colors, form principle, gentes, Main Street, Northampton, painting, people, tonal values, Watercolor, watercolour
Wow it really can give the painting an entirely different feeling. The first is almost…sad, very passive. Looking at the world, but not really seeing it, blank faces in the street. But in the 2nd everybody develops much more character. Some get sunglasses, more sharply defined colors, etc. I love watching the progress of an artist.
Hi, thanks for the comment. The first one definitely is more ethereal. I wanted the detail in the 2nd one, but I lost all the light tones by building up the paint too much in the clothes. I guess I was shooting for the mood of the first one with some of the detail of the 2nd one. That’s what makes art so intriguing – the possibilities are limitless, as are the paths to getting to the intended results!