Tuesday, October 28, 2014

King Me

Last week I was a little frustrated with my painting and a friend of mine suggested I look at things a bit differently and use different colors or different paints to paint my pictures.  Well, I've got some old paints that were made in West Germany.  I don't know what West Germans knew about paint or anything.  I do know that the colors in this set are kind of different and mostly opaque.  When I say they are kind of different, what I mean is that 7 different blues, none of which match with my existing french ultramarine, pthalo blue, cerulean blue deep or cerulean blue.  It's the same thing with the 6 greens, 7 reds and 5 yellows.  

I had used this set for about a week when I first started painting  but couldn't get used to the colors.  They are just weird.  But for this painting I mixed and mixed and came out with colors that I think are pretty good.  In fact, I made a deal with myself.  If Im gonna paint with a wide swath of colors, I can't mix a big pool of one color and keep dipping it in.  I have to make a small pool of it, and add too it or change it each time I dip into it.  You can see in the body of the bird there are reds oranges and yellows all throughout.  And the blue of the bird is at least 4 different shades throughout.  
The log the bird is sitting on started as a really pale grey, like it was really bleached out.  then it got a bit darker grey, blue, yellow, green and finally it is what it is.  I don't think I'm done with this one, you might see hime make a return on this sit in a finalized form, but for now, I'm back and having fun with some new paints.  Trying to mix any kind of a normal color with these crazy paints is fun in itself.  Thanks for the nudge Kelly Murphy.

No comments:

Post a Comment