Dear readers,
Today I worked further on the family of four I started tuesday.
I learned quite a lot the last few days from a few promotional video’s from Nicholas Wilton.
He talks about the importance of design, value and color, among others, and the importance of contrast in a painting. Today I especially learned something about mixing colours.
The thing he said was that if you use colours (for instance red and green), it is nice that you put opposite colours together sometimes because that creates an interesting contrast. Nothing new under the sun.
But: if those colours have nothing in common, they look often too ‘rude’ of ‘hard’ next to each other.
The way to solve this (as Nicholas says) is to put a little bit of green in the red, and a little bit of red in the green. They become ‘family’ this way. The nice thing is that you can do this with more colours: for instance, red, yellow, green and blue. You mix the four colours together in a sort of brownish, greenish colour. Then you use in your painting a little bit of this messy colour with your bright colours. If you do this with all your colours, they become ‘family’, since every colour has something of the others in it.
This way you create harmony, while at the same time creating contrast (because of the contrast that still stays, for instance between red and green).
Hope I’m clear.
Today I finished one of the four paintings. I like it!
Beside I post a photo of the family of four. You have to turn your head 90 degrees: I can’t get the photo straight…
have a nice day!
Simone
Hi Dotty!
thank you!
The different yellow layers come indeed from Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold (what a name, bye the way…), but also from Indian Yellow Hue, which is a beautiful dark warm yellow, more opaque and more yellow than the other one with the difficult name.
And indeed: I also liked the different use of white: the more opaque white in the middle of the circles is from white Neocolor II- crayon, that I heated first with the hairdryer. When it is warm it spreads out really thick and opaque.
So far all the technical details!
Thanks for your enthousiasm,
Simone
Simone, this piece is spectacular. I love it! Love the colors, textures, composition, balance, surprises, and layers. In particular, I am drawn to:
• the varied depths of what is probably quinacridone gold(!); the “unevenness” of color depth is very appealing. Also the scribbles in that color in the bottom right corner;
• the varied opacity/transparency of your use of white; very compelling.
In an earlier conversation we talked about the big gift of daily painting, taking such small steps, but all of them together accumulating in such magnificent development. This piece speaks so strongly of that gift (and magic!).
Thank you for continuing to mention and link to the information you are getting from Nicholas Wilton.
Dotty