Alise Duerr taught my Yellow Day Lily class to the Treasure Coast Decorative Painters chapter in Port St. Lucie, Florida in March 2009. She very kindly sent a class photo. View it on the website. I also made a zoom photo and it’s nice to see smiling faces and great paintings.
New epacket on Teapot Pansies shortly in the shopping cart. 🙂
I love value! I love how it creates form and contour. Take a look at the flat line drawing of the following petal, then look at the painted petal. It could have been interpreted in many different ways but this one was just plain fun to paint. We are using Cool Grey 50% as a basecoat to control the intensity of Raspberry, which is *quite* bright by itself, and to add more interest we are allowing a lot of the Grey to show through. This, to me, is the fun part of painting.
Same petal, painted
A student asked why I used violet to control the yellow. Good question, so let’s explore the possibilities of controlling yellow.
Choices: We can use Black, White, an Earth color, a Neighbor, or the Complement. There are other choices but these are the BASIC ones.
Experiment with the methods above and don’t discount the warm greys – depending on the final result you desire. Doing is the best way to learn color control.
Still working on the tabletop but had to take a break. My fingers never ache as I have a very light touch but my shoulder freezes. 🙂
This was taken directly from a photograph and I can see I need to tweak the design a little bit here and there. It was a lot of fun. I am pleased with the light values I was able to achieve on the dark paper. This will be an advanced seminar – although technique is the same. The definition is the speed at which it is taught and the amount of help. I prefer to walk around the class instead of showing petal by petal.
I am trying to decide if I want to dissolve the tabletop or just persevere until it is the way I want it. Decisions, decisions.
Too much color on edge of petal
OK, let’s analyze the problem. Seems to be to much color, the purple, and too much of a value change. It appears that a wee bit too much of the purple was added in the second layer.
On these petals that are outside the center of interest, Beige was laid down over the entire petal to begin with, then Violet, then Sunburst Yellow. The petal edge is presenting itself as purple which means that even with an overlay of Sunburst Yellow the color did not neutralize.
If we add more color in layers over the top, trying to *fix* this, we will have one petal edge that is more burnished than any of the others. At this point, it might be wise to remove the purple area entirely, either with a kneaded eraser, or gently with an electric eraser and start again.
The second layer should be applied really, really lightly and the end result should be a coolish, neutralized yellow and not purple. I quite like some cool accents throughout a painting so often leave them if they show as ‘slightly’ purple, but they should be interesting and not distracting.
My Petal
Not only is there a value problem here, the purple is too dark against the background but also a temperature problem as the Sunburst Yellow has warmed it up. It needs to more closely match the cool grey background in both value and temperature so going over the final yellow with a cool grey might be very attractive. Choose a cool grey that matches the value of the paper. Do let us know how this goes and don’t hesitate if you have more questions.
More later on why I chose to use complements for this project.
Coming shortly – an illustrated post on correcting values in colored pencils. A student wants to know how to “fix” her painting and has kindly allowed me to share it with you. Pics and my notes on the next post.
Tags: Colored Pencils, correct, values
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Happy New Year to everyone.
