Color, Color, Color

Having fun with this color series. My process is to "paint" a silhouette using masking fluid and then layer, layer, layer transparent washes to achieve the luminous background color I am looking for. This piece has about six layers. Then I remove the frisket and lightly fill my center shape. Here is Cream on Blueberry, 11" x 14", original watercolor, available in my Etsy Shop.

Holiday Mood

It's time! I know it's still 12 days til Thanksgiving, but it feels like Christmas to me. For several years, the Saint Louis Watercolor Society had some fun paint-outs at Christmas time. About 40 painters met in the large fellowship hall of a church and set up elaborate still lifes to share. We spent the day painting and eating. What fun!

Here are my 3 favorite paintings from those days. The originals, all 15" x 20", are not for sale because I pop them into frames and hang them in my home during the season. But the images are available in my Etsy shop printed on white deckled edge greeting cards with matching envelopes. The insides are blank for customized greetings.

Celebrate the Season

Holiday Cheer

Poinsettias

Kudos to Me!

I am honored to have received four awards from Sharon Hart of The Artist's Muse. What a delight! Many of you know her work and thoughtful, detailed posts. She is one of my favorite art bloggers.

The first is the Arte y Pico Award. "It’s an international award for a global community of artist-bloggers, acknowledging that what we create helps make the world a finer place.” I bestow this award to Tomas Karkalas at Modus Vivendi for his art and philosophy.

Next is the Butterfly Award "for the coolest blog I ever know", which of course is very poor grammar. But it is a cool looking award and I would hate to be the one to deface it with a correction. Since the first three blogs I have started to give this to have already just received it, I'm going to keep it on my mantle.

Next is the "I Love Your Blog" award. I'm giving this to Five O'Clock Somewhere for her great ability to mix art with life in her posts
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And last is "My Favorite Blog". I give this award to The Art Zoo. I really don't expect them to post it because the perfect thing about their blog is the clean, focused, look and content they post every day.

Thanks again Sharon!

Color Series Continued

Here are two more paintings in my color series. The first is Green on Wine. I feel it really fits the visual complement color wheel.



And next is Blue Iris on Brown. This piece is an expression of value and temperature. A look at interior decorating trends finds that any pastel on brown is appealing. I think it works best if one is cool and the other warm. Here I placed a warm blue on a cool brown.


Both paintings are 11" x 14" and are available in my Etsy Shop. Have a great weekend!

Color - The Visual Complements

Several years ago I took a workshop with Hilary Page. She is a fine watercolorist who has made an intense study of the pigments from every watercolor manufacturer. She shared her discoveries with us but also explained a new look at color complements - visual complements as opposed to mixing complements. (See her website for an in-depth explanation.)

We are familiar with the traditional 12 section color wheel based on the 3 primaries, red, yellow, blue. The Munsell theory of color, which Hillary subscribes to, squishes the wheel a bit and leaves 5 major colors, 10 total. The 5 are red, yellow, green, blue and purple.

All artisans working with color whether 2d, 3d, fiber, metal, glass, come to realize that some colors just look good together. The traditional complement of red is green. But red, especially an orange red, looks best with blue-green. Well, except at Christmas!

In the days after the workshop I did 4 little paintings of imaginary still lifes to cement my understanding of visual complements. Working clockwise through the 4 paintings you will see that yellow moves to red-orange to blue-red to purple. Blue moves to blue-green, to true green and to yellow-green.
You are probably already making these color decisions subconsciously in your work. But if not, give it some thought. And if you are contemplating buying a piece of art you may better understand why it "works".


Now you see why the painting below works so well. Be back soon with a few more color studies.

Color Series

New series - color, shape and impact! Yes, I'm bouncing all over the creative map once again. On the way to my Tetons series I got waylaid. The brilliant orange/red of the trees and the intense blue autumn sky captured my imagination. To showcase those two colors I placed each on a complimentary color by masking the focal shapes then layering the background with multiple washes. The result.

Here is Tomato on Teal, 15" x 20", original watercolor.



Here is Blue on Chocolate, 11" x 15", original watercolor.


And now, back to the mountains....

Flower Show

I used to be quite into gardening and flower arrangements. I was president of a federated garden club in Richmond, VA and entered a flower show once. The competitions are fierce. While my arrangement was pretty good, I was way off in presentation without enough scene-setting paraphernalia.

Of course I learned this from my mother who was in the garden club wherever we lived. When I paint florals I imagine that I am arranging flowers. Is it a hogarth curve, a triangle, a mass? I painted this last weekend thinking of an armful of fall grasses, ferns, and coleus with a few lilies added for color. To me, it is a mass with a touch of hogarth (up on the left, down on the right).

Here is Fall Flowers, 11" x 15", original watercolor painting available in my Etsy Shop.