HAVING FUN WITH COLOR SCHEMES

With a little tape and a well chosen color scheme, you can have a lot of fun and make an abstract.

On the picture below, I began with the steps below and had an abstract. In November, I had just a few days to come up with a painting of a river boat to put in our local art show. I picked up this abstract, added a riverboat into the background, and changed my abstract to this.

In one of these, I created an abstract of some cats. I had this page of yellow, and I put some vertical strips of masking tape. You place them at odd intervals and make the tape different widths. You can use different widths of tape or make it smaller by cutting it with a craft knife.

(IN class everyone started with white paper)

I used a craft knife to cut cat ears in the tape.

I painted the background in blue bc I decided to have a complementary color scheme of orange and blue.

When it dried, I removed all the tape. and to my dismay, some of the washi tape bled through. Lesson learned: just use regular masking tape on the cold press paper.

I started painting in some more cats. I changed my original idea of complementary to a tetrad that included green and magenta. I added some black. Blacks and browns don't change your overall color scheme, since they are neutrals.

Then I used Posca Pens to add details to my cats.

For one like the trees, just place tape from top to bottom, not evenly spaced, different widths . I chose an analogous color scheme with magenta, blue, and violet. I used salt and spattered water to create some textures, plus a bit of bubble wrap. 

I removed the tape.

I could have done a lot of things, such as paint in silhouette, draw in a scene, etc. My daughter thought it looked like an undersea scene, and wanted me to put in some jelly fish. I decided to keep it simple, and painted the taped areas as trees. Then painted with black some thin branches in the background. Here is how I started it. I used a cut credit card point to scratch bark not the trees.

 

This student work is in different stages of completion, but shows the versatility of the project. Each person tried hard to utilize the color wheel to choose a color scheme.

Here is Angie's pour.