Composition

Basically this assignment drove me to insanity. Drawing medium sized rectangles and coming up with a simple design was no big deal, but to transfer the design on every squares and painting pieces by pieces involved so much concentration power and my patience. I just couldn't hide away from perfectionism which by the way, is almost like an instinct that is embedded into my tiny brain-flaw or not. The project just told me to paint every millimeters of edges as perfectly as possible, thus the whole thing took me about 2 days non stop to finish. But it was fun to see different abstract shapes made by varying tints and shades. I think it was another good study of color, but just too much to fill up.

Color Scale

Yes, as an artist, having a correct knowledge of colors and the scales is very important indeed. There are three main color scales; monochromatic- the same hue in ranges of shades, tone, and tints-, complementary- colors that are complete opposite on color wheel-, and analogous- colors which includes main primary. I choose blue for my primary color, orange being complementary. The most tedious scale in the project I thought is monochromatic, as test color chips had to be made and put together the shades, tints and tones in order of what makes sense in individual's eyes. without the test chips, I found it hard to mix the correct color, especially matching tones with pure tints. I didn't know how important it was and ignored the process, until when I started painting I realized it is not working. However creating other scales were pretty easy, especially the complementary, as it only involved mixing small amounts of opposite colors towards the darkest color, and slowly brightening up to other complementary color. Analogous was fun to play with, because through the process I found different mixes of colors that I liked.

Chromatic Gray

Normally, people would mix black and white to create gray. What people don't realize is that there are different tones and hues of gray which can be created by mixing various colors with white. It all starts with mixing primary colors- or perhaps secondary- for main hue, and from there on mix in white while balancing the hue by subtly adding in the main colors. It is a long process, and I at first, was skeptical about the result, but in the end I've created gray. By this study, I've found that my belief on what gray is set on the general knowledge of the color, thus I was in denial of the end result which seemed more like a pastel tone rather then gray. But gray is in the pastel group, and metal objects proves that gray is not limited to black and white combination, as it's reflective character shows other colors on the object. After this tedious process of learning about gray, painting metallic object was a new turn for me. I no longer used black in order to get the silvery effect, which effected the overall painting- by not using black, my painting seemed to have more depth and looked realistic. It was a good exercise to remind me why already made black is not a reliable color to artists.


Picture from http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/IMG/gray10.gif, painting in Neutrals, Bruce MacEvoy last revised 11/12/2007, (1/05/2008)