Tuesday, April 24, 2012

February 2012

Wow, it has been such a long time since I have posted a thing on here.  I really want to keep it as a record of things that I attempt in art and any improvements I make in artwork.  I have been trying to do something with art each day even if it is watching a DVD, reading about a technique, cleaning my studio (in order to mess it up again) or actually painting.

In February on the painting friends site that I am on we worked on our pallettes and finding out what mixed with what.  Our first task was to make sort of a chart of the colors we had on our active pallettes.

 I sort of took a combination of what I use but by no means showed all.  I also don't pay attention to the numbers but try to pay attention to the transparency of the paints. I really haven't used cads in a while, I have a lot of quins, many new ones which I haven't tried, and I like them. I don't arrange by warm and cool but by color. In case you can't tell I LOVE color. I also hate to waste paints so I have tons of pallettes with paint on them but then can't remember what they are so kind of guess and try and go "Oh that's cool".

For blues I use CB a lot and it is great for mixing purples although I have purple on my pallette when I'm lazy and don't feel like mixing. I notice that the two purples I do have are about the same, DS and WN although the DS seems stronger. I like cerelean also for skies, warmer ones, feel to me the CB makes a cooler sky to my eyes.

Yellows I have a lot as always trying to find a true yellow. It depends on what I am painting. I also have a lemon yellow when I am painting obviously fruit or want something to look really yellow and not green-yellow or brown-yellow; like gamboge for certain things and is a good mixer to make orange. I usually mix an orange but I use one premixed orange pyroll orange that I love but am out of it right now. Use burnt sienna quite a bit as I have different brands of it and as I said don't want to waste paints. Sometimes use BU to get things darker and also will use sepia sometimes but didn't put it on my pallette. For my real darks I will mix in UB with BU and get a nice dark almost black. Have phalo out as sometimes want some punch

Greens pretty much use sap and underwater green but again depending on what I am painting have a few other greens that I use.

Which brings me to reds and pinks and magentas which is kind of a mix between pinks and reds to me actually red-violets I have several on my pallette and several more in my paint boxes depending on what I am trying to paint. Use AC and quin red a lot, and a combo of the reds I have on my pallette using the magentas fairly neat to make dark shadows on say an apple or something.

I also don't clean off the middle of my pallette often as I like the mixes that are created there and will use that sometimes for backgrounds.



And then made some color wheels etc to see what I would get remembering to label all things. 

this one used permanent red with different yellows hansa, aurelin, azo and different blues ultramarine blue, cerilean and tourquoise geniune







this one used alizarin crimson and the blues


 Used three different reds Quin Red, Napthol Red, Perm Red and the same yellow gamboge and same blue cobalt







I then became really ambitious and decided to make a record of most of my paints, mix them so I would know what I would get mixing this one with that one.  I now have a record of these mixed colors using say all the reds I had with all the blues, all yellows with blues, all reds with yellows.  Here are the results.  I really got some neat mixes. 


 Okay spent the morning with my purples and found out many interesting things. In some of the blue only a smidgeon maybe a pin prick of certain reds was needed. Some blues I will only use for certain effects I found out some of my genuines from DS but they have lovely granulation or make lovely greys sort of separate ones very cool, also the light blues don't do too well making purple with the reds I used but can get some effective lavendars. I found some lovely burgandies which I love one in particular.




 

This next sheet GREENS.have some that I really love. If one uses less of the yellow or blue one can get some neat kind of siennas, greys, etc.



 

Okay finished the oranges and got some cool oranges. Tried with all kinds of reds and every yellow I had sort of. Found I got a lot of colors that could be a burnt sienna, really neat and other colors from light to dark depending on the proportions that I used or if it was a stronger red or not. Now my big task for today is take this info, clean off my pallette which is a Pike and decide which ones I want on that as an every day pallette. Then use another pallette to put the other colors that I love to use in some of the paintings and see how that works along with the duct tape suggestion or actually painter's tape with the names so I remember as so many look alike.


I then made a record of all the Daniel Smith paints I have so I would know since I have a lot.





I still have other brands of paints that someday I will do so that I know what they will produce. 

We then did a few little paintings using warm  and cool colors to see the difference. 

Okay I tried today on cups, cool and warm - First mistake went out and bought cheap papers for these samples and didn't check and ended up with 90# paper, hate it doesn't work, hard to control the color or whatever but I plugged on, will make sure cheap paper is 140# for next tries.
What I did was for cool cup used some Hansa yellow for the hit of opposite and the analagous colors were cob. blue, ultramarine, indrathracine (?) and some carb. purple.

Warm cup Hansa yellow, mixed orange from that and Napthol red and hit with some ind. blue and purple made from mix of N. red and ind. blue.


This time I remember to write down as I was using the paints as I tend to walk away a lot. Got a cheap pad of strathmore to do these studies still too cheap to use my Arches for these as there is no chance that they are framable, learning tools.
Warm pear, deep scarlet DS, napthol red MG, Hansa Yellow, orange is mix,

yellow pear, burnt sienna, gamboge, green mix of cerelean blue and hansa,

blue pear, blues, Ind. blue, cobalt, purple mix of phalo and Aliz. C, green mix of Ind blue and aurelian yellow

So this was the bulk of what I worked on in February.  Will continue with March in a new post.











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