Color Theory Final Project

Holidays have been hectic, I've been traveling and I haven't had time to really update my blog. Here is my atmospheric landscape final painting for my color theory class. After 10 hours of work, not bad. I could use 3 more hours to finish this painting off but because of time constraints I didn't have enough time. I would add more details to the foreground and add a bit more color variation to the road. This color scheme is a Blue split-analogous complimentary scheme with accents of yellow-orange and red-orange. =)

De Young Museum

Yesterday I met my Color Theory Class at the De Young Museum to see the Impressionist exhibit. We weren't allowed to take any photos of the paintings but the exhibit is well worth seeing =) There were paintings from Van Gogh, Emile Bernard, Sargent, Cezanne, Gaugin, and many others.

 Golden Gate Park.

Émile BERNARD Symbolist self-portrait
I also saw this painting there at the exhibit and my friends from class and I
overheard some other people talking about how this piece was made because 
Emile and Gaugin became friends and that he was unhappy that Gaugin was taking 
interest in his sister because Gauguin was known to be the biggest player. lol. 

Outside of the De Young Museum

 The title of this painting is "Orpheus" this is also hanging in the exhibit and is completely massive! It's a sight to see! I did a quick search online to see if I could find the bigger than life size Sargent painting I saw inside the exhibit but I guess there are no photos of it anywhere. It must have been about 4.5 feet by 14 at least, it was a life size portrait of a Spanish singer with a golden-yellow dress. Oh well, I guess you'll just have to go to the exhibit and see it for yourself. ;)

Light temperature Influencing Reflected Color - Still Life

This is a design project I did for my Color Theory class, this was an exercise on using filter gels over the lighting to see how they influence the light temperature as it casts on the objects. I'm getting much better at mixing the colors and really matching the colors together. There was one key color I used here and that was a light orange, and then I applied all the other colors on top. The key color helps to harmonize the objects in the painting. Doing these projects are such a process, I have to generate a black and white version in graphite, then I take it and photocopy it and from there I generate colored pencil comps to work out the color scheme. I imagine most artists have a similar approach, and it is quite an effective method - so that you don't end up wasting time jumping right into the painting. I've had other projects where we painted directly in previous classes without any rhyme or reason,  but I really like the process of doing roughs because it forces you to explore and really slow you down a little to analyze and observe what you're doing, instead of mindlessly attacking the canvas. THINK about what you're going to paint first and strategize so that you can plan and make no mistakes, especially if you're on a time crunch and were actually working for a client.

     This was the still life I set up in class and the photo reference I used for the project.

                            Colored pencil comps and messy desk full of paints.

                                          Waiting for the paint to dry

                                           Almost Finished...

Optic Mix - Color Theory Class

This is what I started off with... building colors on top of each other.

 After two weeks and over 20 something hours of work on it...
It still needs work... this was really challenging to work on, the goal of the assignment was to not mix the colors together but using a few colors that you could mix up and down the value chart and grouping them together to create an in-between color... thus your eyes creating an optic mix of colors. Staring and working on a piece of 4x5 illustration board with a ruling pen making dots... lets just say after a while of repetitive dotting... dot dot dot.... my eyes were starting to play tricks on me. Gah! Haha. It's sort of frustrating trying to match the colors and mix the exact colors close to my photo reference.

End result... the cheeks were a little too dark =( I tried!! lol. At least I got it done ;)