Anatomy of a Painting: Luminous Lands III

 

Primarily photos Only for now. More detailed descriptions to follow. But basically this painting illustrates a few points: the use of an expanded dynamic symmetry armature, cropping of a photo to help compose a painting that would follow the armature, drawing of the armature on the panel and adjustments made throughout the process. In the case of this painting, I originally tried to do it on oil paper, but decided it didn't work for me. So I used the resulting intermediate painting as the source for a painting executed on linen on panel.

Photo of the cliffs in Los Alamos New Mexico:

I cropped the photo so that the darker cliff against the lighter one would be set as my focus. I then used Wise Photo App to make sure it aligned as I expected:


I used an expanded dynamic symmetry armature, with self-similar rectangles and rebatement to create many diagonals.



First on Oil Paper:







The texture of the oil paper wasn't working for me. So I started over on my standard linen on panel (acrylic primed since I am using water-based oils).









I scraped off some of the bright pink cliff in the background and added some yellow and darks to give it texture. and otherwise added lights and details in the foreground trees and hill.


I decided that the right-hand cliffs weren't to scale and made them larger here:




Popular posts from this blog

Color Wheel Revisited

Image
We will be using the triadic color wheel from the Color Wheel Company to illustrate color relationships. a good resource is the book, Color is Everything, by Dan Bartges, a book with thorough descriptions of this tool (I will have it in the workshop for you to peruse).  Triadic Color Wheel from the Color Wheel Company: Study of the Triadic Color Wheel. The color wheel provides 12 hues around the circle on each side  On the one side we can see the effects of mixing red, yellow and blue and white and black with each of the 12 hues by rotating the wheel. This side also has a value scale that can be matched up with each of the hues to identify the value of each hue. The second side shows the tint, tone and shade for each of the hues. Directions are provided for determining analogous colors, complementaries , split complements, triads and tetrads. We will be discussing these at length. For a preliminary website link with definitions see:  http://www.tigercolor.com/col
Read more

(extra) Color Mixing on the web with online Apps with RGB and CMYK

Image
May begin color mixing by studying color pickers provided by on-line tools. These are based on the RGB color wheel for web development, with its additive nature.   So first, an explanation of the RGB colors on the color wheel. We will see the representation of the R, G, B hues as 'hexadecimal'; e.g., red is #FF0000, where the FF masks the red perfectly and 00 masks the green and blue perfectly, but you will notice that the third hue in these tertiaries are masked with 7F. Binary numbers are 0's and 1's; 7 = 0111 in binary; F = 1111 in binary, so we see 0, 7 and F here. White would be FFFFF a perfect mix of R, G and B, while Black is 000000, a complete absence of an R, G or B. Yellow, magenta and cyan are complements of blue, green and red in this scheme.  In fact the hexadecimal notation for these complements has '1's in place of '0' and vice versa for the primaries and secondaries.  The tertiaries are aligned somewhat differently., with 7F m
Read more

(extra) Color Palette Examples

Image
==================================== Limited palette of Don Finkeldei: www.finkeldeistudio.com. I have studied with Don and used his method extensively. He has many articles on the topic that are well worth reading and re-reading. His color charts, are quite useful and found in a new article on the website. His color palette consists of the Utrecht Artist Oils: cadmium yellow light, cadmium red light, ultramarine blue plus white, as well as alizarin crimson and viridian for transparent darks and sometimes the convenience color, cadmium orange.  He creates a few values of greys from a dark formed by the yellow, red and blue to be used in the mixing.  He also uses his AC/V transparent dark for accents. He pre-mixes his colors on the palette. ==================================== String Palette: I would like to include some material here on the palette of strings based on the Munsell theory, that formed my very first palette for oil painting. My instructor was the artist, Kei
Read more