Possibly my last true painting from Color Theory class: A primary triadic harmony. An expressionistic use of color. A longing for home…

Original photo:

This is another Color Theory assignment created from a black & white image, this time flatter and more 2D.
I feel like it’s a little bit of a departure for me… maybe because I didn’t go with the image I originally wanted to do (it was too simple to meet assignment requirements).
But this one is a sheet music cover from the 1920s. A little politically incorrect maybe, but funny!!
I used a complimentary color harmony, meaning colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. In this case, red and green, the neutrals in between, and all their respective tints, tones, and shades.

Ok, now I think it’s only right to show you the original, too.

I don’t think my version is as successful of an image, now that I look at both together. I toned down the brightness of the title, and used a relatively bright hue of green where the original was quite neutral. These things changed the balance somewhat. I think what could help my version at this point would be to differentiate between the house and ground (make the ground a slightly darker green), even though they’re flush in the original.

He asked,
“Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?”

This week, for the first time, I used paint to try to somewhat realistically portray life.

Class: Color Theory
Concept: Analogous Color Harmonies
Assignment: Starting from a black & white photograph, paint an image using only the tints, tones, and shades of three adjacent hues.

Somewhat in reaction to the subject and colors of my recent mosaic project, I chose this very expressive family portrait and a red-orange, orange, and yellow-orange color harmony.

Here is my warm-up with the colors, as well as the result of a short lesson in using shade to paint planes and volumes.

Now for the real thing: I traced the basic forms onto illustration board, and filled them with the basic values, omitting all detail. Then I started to use small variations in the colors to give volume to the clothing. Here is how it was coming along after a few hours.

So far so good, right? I liked being able to choose the colors of the outfits, since the original photo gave no hints except value.

I was scared and yet eager to start on the faces. The slow pace of this project allowed my imagination plenty of room to speculate about the family in this portrait. I definitely had the intention to paint the three things Picasso mentioned. But there’s more at play than good intentions.

Our left brains have come up symbols for everything, and it’s the right brain that sees only shapes and shades and can reproduce them accurately. Nowhere can this be seen more than in human depiction! This next part of the painting was war between my two hemispheres.

Plus, the subtleties multiplied. The slightest tweak of an eyebrow can change the whole expression, and the difference between a human and a mutant can lie in the shape of the nose alone! After lots and LOTS of tweaking, I’m proud to present to you a sufficiently human-looking family for my tastes. You’ll still notice areas where the left brain took control of the battlefield, but in the end, I’d say it lost the war.

Nature is definitely a worthwhile stop on the road to color proficiency and inspiration.

By the way, Aristotle theorized that different colors were derived from combinations of sunlight, firelight, air, and water. I found that interesting.

Last week, our teacher came in with a bag full of leaves that we could pick from. We made grids of 1/2″ squares that we were supposed to fill with the colors we were observing in the leaf. No adjacent squares could contain exactly the same hue.

Once we got past wanting to somehow depict the shape of the leaf, it was pretty easy! A nice excursion into the land of abstraction, too.

or, the Project That Took Too Long.

…and yet, was definitely worth it in the end!

This Color Theory assignment was to make a monochromatic mosaic. I had to choose a black and white photograph, and then decide which single hue I thought would best suit the subject matter. I choose this very European scene, because I thought its geometry would translate well into mosaic tiles, and there were lots of interesting variations in value (light/dark).

I selected red-violet for the hue I wanted to work with, because it has an element of coolness, yet the warmth of red. In other words, this is a picture of blocks of stone and frigid water, but it still elicits an happy reaction…

The requisite warm-up (not as easy as it looks!!). The top colors, where found in the original photo, shift to those in the the bottom row in the monochromatic mosaic.

So, I located the different values of white to black on the photo, and transferred those shapes onto illustration board. (I was being far too detailed, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

Then, I painted watercolor paper with different values and saturations of red-violet, from whence I would cut out my tiles.

I’d never done a mosiac before, so I wondered how I would cut out the exact shapes of the value areas. I came up with a tracing paper and needle method – making perforations onto the colored paper to guide my exacto knife. So, I had the shapes I wanted on tracing paper, then laid the tracing paper over the color swatches, pinholed the edges of the shapes, then cut them out from the color swatches. Get it? Here’s something of what my tracing paper looked like by the end.

Being unsure of the end result, I used little wads of sticky tack to put down my tiles on the illustration board, in case I should need to change them later. This was both good and bad: I ran out of time to actually glue every piece down before it was time to turn it in. The teacher didn’t notice, though! So it’s all good.

The reward for all my sweat and toil? Seeing this from the back of the classroom during critique. From far away, it looked extremely photo-realistic! Other pieces actually looked like a mosaic. If I EVER attempt a mosaic again, maybe I’ll try to strike a happy balance between the two.

Amendment

I have to add this, it’s so cool. My friend sent me a postcard from France a couple months ago and I just took another look at it. Some things about it looked strangely familiar…

I would recognize those lampposts anywhere now!

So now I actually know what I was painting – le Pont Neuf à Paris!
And I found modern day shot almost identical to the composition I used here.

My moment of 4, 5, 6 inspiration went something like this:

“Holy wow! There is a note in the chromatic scale for each of the 12 hues! I will infuse my color wheel with the additional meaning by cutting out the shape of a little quarter note from the corner of each tile.”

That was my plan. But by the time I had chosen my 12 tiles,  I was so pleased with the color flow and richness that trying to exacto a tiny note out of each one seemed extremely risky. Sigh. There would be no creativity after all. (But at least my color mixing abilities ROCK!)

Then, I found a compromise that made use of the required cover sheet. Tracing paper is much easier to cut!

“Now, I shall rest and enjoy the fruits of my labor.”
Little did I know what awaited me!

Meet the expanded 12-hue color set. Each pure hue becomes a family with a Tint, Tone, and Shade.

One of the exciting things about this chart is that many colors are recognizable in and of themselves. For example, the hue with a technical name of “blue-violet tint” is… periwinkle!
And some of them, in the end, just don’t fit.

Mixing all of these swatches (some many times over) took the entire afternoon. The best part? Making the periodic trek to the bathtub to rinse off my mixing palette and tools. I have chosen a field in which I am invited to make a mess. How great is that.