Color studies and issues (Patreon)

After I built the maquette I took a ton of pictures of it and did a sketch of it from life.

I quickly realized that I should have built the maquette from the same proportions as the compositional sketches. I will probably do that every single time after this. 

You can see that the sketch from life is much less dynamic than the sketches I was doing from imagination.

This highlights a potential downside to this process that I've been worried about from the beginning: toning down the art work.

The point of doing all this reference work and building models isn't simply to make things look more realistic. It's to enhance the fantastical. And render the surreal more vividly. Part of that comes from them being more realistic, but the impact comes from dynamic composition and gesture and energy first.

The realism should map on to the dynamic, so the maquette must come out of the imaginative sketches. That's my new motto. It's long.

So anyways, I just ended up creating more work for myself when I started working on the comprehensive sketch.

I put my photo references, pictures of the maquette and the original composition sketch in photoshop.

I traced the original composition and then layered pieces of the photo references and pictures of the maquette on top of the original composition sketch and lowered the opacity to see how far off everything was.

I drew the comprehensive from there and adjusted accordingly, frequently going back to the maquette picture to check the overall lighting. 

I can imagine you might want to take a nap after reading the above description. How do you think I feel? 

To get out of the tediousness of that mess but also continue being productive, I started doing some color studies.

I want to use this pthalo turquoise color I have for this painting. I'm trying to come up with a rationalization for it. But the truth is, it just feels right for the work. 

I wanted some sort of violet or magenta to go with the turquoise and a yellow or orange for warmth and to neutralize those two. 

I just started putting random colors down on the page. Trying out different purples, violets and magentas, dioxazane purple, ultramarine violet, permanent violet, quinachrodone magenta. I tried mixing them with the turquoise. 

Then I started doing the same thing with oranges and yellows. Cadmium orange, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Red Iron Oxide. 

I narrowed it down to a few colors and created those little diamonds you can see in the picture above. There's 4 of them. Look for the purest colors if you don't see them right away (I got a little carried away.)

Those little diamonds are an idea I got from James Gurney's "Color Triads." Basically they just show you the range of possibilities you will have with any 3 given colors. Maybe I'll do a longer video or post about that in the future.

I did some very bad, very loose color studies of the idea with some of the colors.

I traced my composition onto some little 3x3 inch canvases I had laying around and did two more tighter, but still very loose color studies. 

I decided on a hue called permanent violet dark and burnt Sienna to go with my pthalo turquoise. Although I'm sure I will end up bringing other colors into the mix.

I finally moved on to a 6x6 inch study  (the featured photo of this post.) I wanted to go a little tighter with the composition and redering and really get into the colors. It was a test painting really.

I'm really glad I did it because it helped me see some issues to resolve and some ideas about how to resolve them in the final painting. Which I'll be starting soon and updating you as I do.

Happy March 13th Everybody

Yesterday was my dad's birthday. We ate the most delicious cookies in celebration.

have fun

goodnight Sweeties