Color

White Cups – A Study

| cathmary1030

I love the idea of painting white objects because I know you’re not supposed to use, say, Titanium White to indicate snow, sand, white dishware, white linen, white flowers, clouds, etc. Instead that “white” will have greyed blues, greyed lavenders (light purple), perhaps some yellows and/or oranges.

So, when I saw the reprint of “White Cups” in How to Paint Fast, Loose and Bold: Simple Techniques for Expressive Painting, I thought I would give it a try. Can I come close to matching these colors?

When I look at the reprint of Mollica’s work, I see light shades of yellow, shades of yellow ochre, lavender, greyed purple, maroon, an olive green, a desaturated orange, a dark purple “black” that might be a mix of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna or a Payne’s gray. I see greyed blue, and even a rich brown that might be burnt umber or might be a mix of red, blue and yellow. At best, there might be two small highlights of a pure white on the lip of each cup.

Sounds good, but I failed at color mixing. Ugh. I drew over the dried big splotches of paint (see right)with compressed charcoal because it wasn’t even obvious what the object was! Then I ended up deciding to heck with it, I’ll use a glaze of titanium white — and glazes, I’m told, are not successful with opaque pigments like titanium white.

Since the painting was a fail anyway, I went ahead and did the glaze, careful to keep my compressed charcoal lines. (left most photo)

Afterwards, I used a color picker app to get a sense of the colors in the photo, which all tend toward brown. I suspect that is partly an artifact of the photo, which is quite probably not an accurate reproduction as far as the colors are concerned.

Lessons Learned

| cathmary1030

Using a demo project in Mixed Media Color Studio by Kellee Wynne Conrad, I attempted a landscape scene. And unfortunately I used a vivid fluorescent orange paint as background. This was a huge mistake!

The entire landscape became, for me, an exercise in trying to paint over the vivid orange, so I got very sloppy. I also discovered that my yellow paint was entirely too transparent — and that I need to pay attention to how transparent or opaque the paint I’m using is.

I also broke basic landscape rules around atmospheric perspective, in that the more distant the shapes (mountains, trees, etc.) are, the bluer they should be.

Rethinking Composition: Poppies at Lake Louise

| cathmary1030

Okay, I think I’ve figured it out! The composition in the color study from the last post is utterly BORING!! Not to mention the dark mountain shapes looming over the scene… they just distract. The dark shapes take the viewer’s eye completely away from what I wanted to be the focus — the poppies against the lake. Worse, they look so forbidding and foreboding that it is completely off-putting — I just want to look away at something else entirely!

I’m cropping the photo further so that only the poppies, the foreground grasses (for the yellow-green counter-balance to the red flowers), and the teal blue lake show.

As with the color study, the tree at the right of the photo will be excluded in the painting I do.

UPDATE (next day): Now that I look at the photo again, I might just leave the tree. It occurs to me that what I know to be the lake might instead be seen as a smaller pond with distant mountains (the darker blue water current) and a blue sky (the lighter blue at the top of the photo). Hmmm. Something to think about.

Using NuPastel as Underpainting… Paper Differences

| cathmary1030

Sometimes doing the NuPastel thing doesn’t make sense to me. I noticed on one of my follow-along courses that the suggested paper to use was dark blue Pastelmat, and the suggested underpainting was to be done in Blue Spruce NuPastel. But the instructions in the form of a PDF clearly showed a taupe-colored paper, because Blue Spruce doesn’t really show up on a dark blue paper!

In any case, I tested the NuPastel by using a light touch on two different papers: the dark blue Pastelmat (where it went on “like butter”) and gives more coverage, even without rubbing it in, and the twilight Canson Touch, where it was hard and scratchy, and seemingly added no value at all!

PastelMat
Canson Touch

I later attempted to brush it out of both papers, and failed. All it did was smear and grind in. Ugh!

3 Times a Hot Mess… But at least I’ve Learned something!

| cathmary1030

This project was based on an image by MustangJoe from Pixabay. I used Colourfix Smooth in Blue Haze all three times, as well as using the same palette.

All three efforts were failures, but at least I learned a few things.

Attempt #1

First time around, I did an underpainting (of the dark areas only) using a Blue Violet NuPastel. Using this color was a BAD idea! Why? Because I would later add a dark gray-green, and a reddish brown on top of that blue violet, which made mud. Ugh!

First time around, I also used too heavy a hand, in effect scribbling with the pastels trying to cover the paper. Bad idea — too heavy a hand can ALSO create mud.

First time around, the pine trees were cartoonish. But I was so frustrated with the mud mess I didn’t care at that point!

Attempt #2

  • My second attempt was successful in that I maintained a much lighter touch. But I still had mud because I still did the Blue Violet underpainting before using the dark green and the reddish brown.
  • The pine trees were rendered a little bit more like the photo, which pleased me.
  • I struggled with laying down color with certain pastel sticks. I ended up mostly with broad strokes done vertically, which doesn’t really work for the sky.

Attempt #3

  • This time I skipped the underpainting — whew! Still had mud because the gray-green and the orangey-brown are NOT a good pairing!
  • Had better luck with making marks for the sky, but the colors are not quite right to my mind. In analyzing the source image, I realize there is more of a lavender hint to the darks rather than green brown.

I need to try colors with more purple and less green and brown. I may need to experiment with papers which have more grit.

Reference photo
Sticks used
Violet Blue NuPastel

Attempt #1
Attempt #2
Attempt #3

Color Study with the Color Grab App

| cathmary1030

I was uneasy about my color selection for the little boy’s rubber boots — the part in shadow. The color constancy illusion would lead one to think the entire boot is yellow, but if you squint and then look at the photo, the boot in shadow is clearly not the same yellow as the boot in sunlight. So, at first I used a bluish-gray for the boot in shadow.

Then I remembered, I have the “Color Grab” app on my Android phone! I can check the suggested color, and then see if I have a pastel to match.

“Color Grab” showed the shadowed boot to be a yellow green, as shown in the first screen grab (see the small and larger white circles). Then you click on the Hex code for the color, and, if a listing of approximate paint colors is available, they will be listed. That display is what I used to approximate a pastel stick color.

I then added the yellow green color to the boot, but I need to blend it in.

In addition, the sunlit part of the boot is actually a whiter (paler) yellow, as shown by the screen grab, so I will need to adjust as appropriate there.