two color painting exercise

PAINTING IN TWO COLORS

This is a 2-part lesson in learning to think out of the box when it comes to color.

Be sure to look at some of Carol Carter’s amazing paintings on her web site. Notice 4 things: 1) How her backgrounds move from warm to cooler either top to bottom or side to side. 2) How her colors are clean “out of the tube” colors. 3) How she may place color from the cool side of the background into the warm side when she’s doing the foreground. 4) How she uses “back runs” or “blossoms”. 5) How she incorporates “surprise” colors. She doesn’t pay as much attention to “local” color as she does colors that create a mood.

Exercise #1

Choose one of these two sketches or draw your own. I just want some simple, easy to shade shapes, that connect in some way.

Choose TWO colors, a warm and a cool, that you think will work well together to create a mood that you like. These do not have to be complementary colors. Do some color samples to see what you might like to try. Maybe go for something unusual.

Working either top to bottom or left to right, wash the background with dark cool, gradually lightening it, and then gradually add your warm color until by the bottom of the picture (or right) you have pure warm color. (I did the beach scene with aqua and yellow ochre.) You can miskit off areas if it makes you more comfortable. You do not have to have a perfect half/and/half background. But it’s nice if some of your objects are completely inside one color, and some are completely inside the other color. (EX: The seashells are completely inside the ochre color. The pail is mostly in the aqua.)

As you “watch your paint dry,” try spattering in some clean water drops to create blossoms. In my example you can see the blossoms in the aqua and in the sand.

 Let this dry completely. Remove any miskit if you used it.

Start shading your figures in the color that is opposite from what its background is. If the shells have an ochre background, I will shade them with the aqua. If the pail has a blue background, I will shade it with the ochre, adding some blue in areas if I need it.

As you paint, leave patches or pure white so that you can add a “surprise” color later.

NEXT TIME: Trying the same shapes, only using 3 colors to shade.