Thursday, October 14, 2010

What I'm Up To

Class was great yesterday.  Welcome to our new student, Susan. I love it when we work on drawing and faces.  Congratulations to everyone for jumping in and being fearless.  Tim, your best portrait drawing yet!

This morning I was up early and painting.  I corrected the lay-in from yesterday's demo - meaning I looked at shapes, shapes, shapes and made better decisions.

I started a painting using a limited complementary palette of blue/orange. The palette is from The Yin/Yang of Painting: A Contemporary Master Reveals the Secrets of Painting Found in Ancient Chinese Philosophy by Hongnian Zhang.  This book is out of print, but well worth searching out. There are major sections on value, temperature and chroma; a thorough explanation of the three complementary palettes; a look at creating texture and then three chapters where Hongnian Zhang applies all of the above to the three genres of still life, landscape and figure.  I highly recommend this book!  

The Yin/Yang of Painting: A Contemporary Master Reveals the Secrets of Painting Found in Ancient Chinese Philosophy

The blue/orange palette is cadmium red scarlet, cadmium orange and cadmium yellow deep as high chroma oranges with burnt sienna as a low chroma orange.  The blues are blue violet, cobalt blue and phthalo turquoise blue as high chroma blues with indigo as a low chroma blue.  The palette also includes titanium white and ivory black.  Notice there is a warm, cool and true hue for orange and blue.

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