Nespera Tree and Rosemary Plant

The large leaves of the Nespera Tree and the small leaves of the Rosemary Plant are painted using the same palette.

Loquat Tree (Eriobotrya-japonica) Nespera

Rosemary Plant

The palette for the leaves is cadmium lemon, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, cerulean blue and french ultramarine blue.

The background colors are drastically different.  The color scheme for the Nespera illustration is Analogous with Near Complement.  The color scheme for the Rosemary illustration is Extended Analogous.

Sketchbook drawings: drawn first in ink with fountain pen followed by watercolor.  3.5″ x 2.5″ standard size for Artist Trading Cards.

 

Cherries as Jack-o-lanterns

I can’t help myself.  As soon as the cornfields begin to dry and the trees start to dress in fall fashion, the witch comes out in me and everything transforms into carved pumpkins.

Color Scheme Game: Extended Analogous  (Yellow-Orange, Orange, Red-Orange, Red, Red-Violet and Violet)

Drawn first with fountain pen followed by watercolor

 

Using Botanical Shapes to Play With Color

Plants provide limitless possibilities for variations of shapes and textures.

Ivy Vines

Reality inspires the shapes, imagination provides the colors.  What a great team!

For more variety, I allowed the pigments to mix on the paper, wet in wet within the boundaries of each leaf shape.

Sketchbook drawing: drawn first with fountain pen filled with Noodler’s Black Ink, followed by watercolor.

Color Scheme: Extended Analogous.

 

Trumpet Parts No. 95, Extended Analogous Color Scheme

Almost all of the paintings in the Trumpet Parts Series have been closed-form, closed-value paintings.

Trumpet Parts No. 95

The colors and values are limited by the boundaries of their shapes, creating paintings more decorative than realistic.  I found it easier to experiment with the color schemes by first creating an ink drawing of closed shapes, then painting the shapes with flat washes of full-saturation color based on a twelve hue color wheel.

With only five more paintings to go in this series, I am already turning my attention to the next series for my morning, wake-up paintings, Family Treasures. My goal will be to include open-form, open-value paintings that include a broader expression of the color scheme by including more neutral color mixes and saturation levels.

Sketchbook painting: drawn first with fountain pen, followed by watercolor.

 

Perspective Abstractions

You’ll find the trumpet part if you look hard enough.

Trumpet Parts No. 80, abstracted perspective

For some reason, my scanner reads the colors oddly when scanning from my handmade sketchbook with the Rives BFK paper pages.  Even with color adjustments I don’t seem to be able to reproduce the painting as it appears in my sketchbook.  This is as close as I can get.

Creating these altered perspective drawings captivates my brain in a similar way that working jigsaw puzzles does.  I search for patterns, shapes and color intersections.  The nice thing about spending time working in my sketchbook is that when the drawing is completed I don’t take it all apart and throw it back in a box.

When playing the Color Scheme Game, I am forced to concentrate even more on the changes in color value and color saturation.  The eye does not find its way to an object, it simply moves through the composition.  The eye does this when looking at any painting, but the brain thinks it has arrived when it recognizes something familiar.

I am attempting to reprogram my brain to get past seeing sky, trees and ground when painting en plein air.  I will be able to create a better reality when I can see the landscape abstractly.

Sketchbook painting:  Trumpet Parts No. 80, drawn first in pencil, followed by watercolor.  Extended Analogous Color Scheme.

 

Color Scheme Game, Sample Paintings

Extended Analogous with One Complement

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Links to sample paintings using the various color schemes are now on the Color Scheme Game Page.

Playing the Color Scheme Game every morning is helping to strengthen the colors I use the rest of the day and into the night.  The painting above, painted during the weekly Blues Jam, is an excellent example of unintentional application of my morning experiments.

Painting: Portrait of V.D. King drawn first with dip pen followed by watercolor.  Painted at The Grisly Pear in New York City.

 

Extended Analogous Color Scheme

Warmth of skin tones work backward toward cooler shadows against the wall.

Peter Whipple playing Harp

The stage lights at The Grisly Pear in the Village flush the skin tones with the warmth of orange.  I like the way the colors transition from the skin tones to the dark red / violet of the shadow.  This turns out to be an extended analogous color scheme spanning the color wheel from yellow / orange to red / purple.

Sketch:  Painted live during the Ed Sullivan Blues Jam at The Grisly Pear held every Monday night, 107 Macdougal  New York, NY. Drawn first with black ink using dip pen, followed by washes of watercolor.