Colour Studies

Colour Studies

Here are some more from the last couple of weeks. Starting to move away from experimental use of colour to something that is more representational.

A large part of the fun of this is when people come up and want to see what I am painting. I used to want privacy, but now I actually enjoy it. They are always complimentary, which is not necessarily a reflection on whatever skills I might have. Most people regard any level of painting ability as a sort of magic trick. One guy who was clearly down on his luck walked up to me at Liverpool Street Station and told me how impressed he was with the painting, then asked if I could spare some change. He found my one weakness. How could I refuse.

Colour Studies

Back to doing some colour studies. I find it remarkable that once you calibrate your colour sense to the world of the painting some remarkable things happen. What looks like grey on the palette can stand in for green in the world of the painting, for instance.Pink can become white, rust can become scarlet, olive can become black. This shift in calibration can force the viewer to respond emotionally to the painting in different ways.

Another Sketchcrawl in London

It was Sketchcrawl day again. It was a great turnout with about 7 of us in total. We walked along the South Bank of the Thames from Borough Market to Festival Hall. To see everyone's efforts, check out the forum:
http://www.sketchcrawl.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=3334

London studies

Some more...

I'm back

Here are some more colour studies from around London. Each is in gouache on heavy weight paper, about 1.25 inches in height. There is no need, I've found, to create a large painting in order to explore colour and composition. When scanned at 300dpi a lot of interesting accidental details seem to pop out.

Things I might have seen in London, part 10

In colour with a "u", here are some gouache studies which I have been working on over the past couple of weeks. It's a challenge to work in the rain and snow sometimes. Look closely and you can see some rain spots. I learned a very important lesson in the course of working on these: zinc white sucks. I bought a cheap Windsor and Newton gouache set which came with zinc white. This pigment has the unfortunate property of absorbing colour from pigments that are applied on top of it. The solution: use permanent white instead. Permanent white uses titanium dioxide as a pigment base. It's superb, very opaque, and layers quite well.