Random word of the day - "Union" |
It's time– Time to move on from rendering basic shapes to colors. Today I'm reviewing another part of the workshop notes I took, which involve value, hue, saturation, and where they exist on basic shapes.
Here's another warning
If you have no interest or experience in painting from life, I suggest you skip the following notes. Don't read it or you'll get bored and confused. I don't want to lose you!! Just go ahead and scroll down to my horrible exercise-paintings.
If you are interested, however, and my notes end up confusing you in any way, go ahead and send me a message or ask a question in the comments.
I'll gladly help.
Joan Miro said:
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.What a beautiful comparison. And now, on with the notes!
- The most beautiful greys are the ones produced by mixing opposite (complementary) colors. Also if you ever want to desaturate a color while painting (blue for example), just mix in a tiny bit of it's opposite (that would be orange) to get that effect.
- In real-life, there is never a color that is truly free of saturation. There is so much color in everything, even black, white and grays.
- If you want to direct the eye using grays, a subtle way to do that is by using complementary grays (for example, an orange-gray against a blue-gray).
- On objects (perhaps more so on simpler ones rather than complex), the true "base" color of that object is the most saturated one. It is only located where a light plane changes into a shadow plane (on the edge of the light plane just before the core shadow).
- The light and shadow planes are of course both lower in saturation, but the light one is higher in value, and dark one lower.
- Everything outside is affected by the color of the sky, because everything is lit by the sky's ambient (reflected) light. Areas/objects in the shadow are more affected because they are mostly lit by ambient light, in contrast to areas/objects that are in direct sunlight (which is stronger).
- So, anything in the sun or direct light will be colored by the light-source, while anything in the shadow will be colored by reflected light.
- Rendering simple shapes in color
- Paint background
- Paint silhouette using base (most saturated) color
- Light and shadow planes
- Cast shadow and occlusion
- Variation within planes
- Core shadow
- Re-apply base color if needed (the saturated core)
- Reflected light/colors
- Highlight
- Saturated rim around highlight
- Rim-light
- Soften edges
- You don't always have to follow these rules— Changes in color temperature can be used outside their natural scope if you need to convey a certain message (when value/composition aren't doing enough).
My maybe not so horrible exercises
The first thing I did was check how trained my "eye" was in terms of seeing what color a "color" really is. All I had to do was grab a photo off the internet, use the eyedropper tool to choose some of the photo's colors, and then use the color-picker to manually re-produce the colors I picked. I have to keep trying until I get an exact match. The three things to think about when doing this are value, hue and saturation.
Color comparison exercise |
The large circles are the original colors picked from the photo using the eyedropper tool, and the smaller circles around each are my attempts at matching. I managed to re-produce most of the colors in 1-3 tries, but had trouble with the purple and green. I'm so proud!
Not so proud of this one though D:
Today's Sense-of-Achievement To-Do List was:
- Studies
- Morning drawing warm-ups
- Review Imaginism Workshop notes
Focal Points- Colors
More colors & Values
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