Today's post is about a turning point in my education in dealing with color. It's wordy, possibly incomprehensible and contains several links, I won't blame you if you just scroll down to the monster. I will say, however, that if you happen to be a fledgling artist like myself and you are struggling with painting, there just may be something hidden in my own adventure that might help you in yours.
I started writing this as a straightforward explanation of the changes I went through, artistically, to come to my current level of understanding when I think about color. As I started piecing together the sequence of events, I realised that it has been an absolutely roundabout journey (mostly because I learned things out of order) and that I have had several teachers along the way.
Until just recently (within the last six months) I've had a sad, sad understanding of how color works. For some reason during college and for a long time after I left school, the words; hue, saturation, and value, never really clicked in my head. They were just artist jargon. When I finally did understand the technical definition of the words, I still failed to grasp the importance of them when it comes to making a painting. It was frustrating simply because my paintings showed an obvious lack of understanding and, clearly, understanding is something a professional artist is going to need At one point, I even resolved to stick to simply making images in pencil and/or ink. I believe one or two of my previous posts actually illustrate that decision. I was ready to give up on color all together, but then something happened.
I consider my first teacher in the realm of color to be James Gurney (of Dinotopia fame, among other things.) He has shared his method for working with a given color scheme in a painting a couple of times on his blog. I won't explain it here, he does it better (this is part one of a three part post.) In an awkward way I came to understand hue and how it could be used, and yet I couldn't put it into practice.... there was still something that I was missing. I think this is the point where an art-egg was planted in my brain...
My second teacher would be Dan dos Santos. A long while back, he put up a post on Muddy Colors (check it out) about duotone illustrations. Duotone illustrations were done with black, white, and one color. I was blown away with what the artists had accomplished with only one freakin' color. Nothing immediately clicked in my head, I was just so impressed with the artists' skill that I had no room for cognitive thought. I realise now that this is where my understanding of what saturation could be used for came from and the overall idea of what they had done stuck with me. Unfortunately, I still didn't have all the pieces. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure this is what fertilized the egg James Gurney had planted. Suddenly, I had an art-baby gestating in my brain...
Now we get to the guy that delivered that art-baby. I had the awesome opportunity to attend Illuxcon last November. While there I met my third teacher, E. M. Gist. Not only was he a really great guy to get to talk to and a great artist, he is also a teacher at the Watts Atelier in California. I mention this because after returning home I decided to see if he had a blog. While clicking through his past posts I came across this particular gem. In the post he describes the Reilly method of painting that he teaches in one of his classes. Somehow, seeing this method briefly described blew my mind. Here was a way to control value in color that actually worked for me. This was the missing piece... the piece that brought everything else together! Seriously, this was like finding gold for me.
...Now I have a full on art-infant kicking and screaming in my head.
Since I get to choose how I raise my art-child, I have since bastardised all of the information that these guys have so awesomely given to me (yes, they write their blogs just for me, and no one else) but things seem to be going well enough right now. I know I still have a long way to go, but it's nice to have a solid starting point.
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| Bhunin T'hoven |
In keeping with the procreation theme of this post, today's image is a portrait of Bhunin T'hoven. Bhunin is a soon to be proud parent. I say parent because Bhunin's race reproduces asexually, and so I'm not really sure if Bhunin would be considered a mother or a father. I do know that Bhunin has a considerable collection of very fuzzy sweaters.
The portrait itself is my attempt at doing a completely monochromatic painting. In the spirit of the duotone illustrations, I wanted to see just how far I could push yellow. Now that I'm looking at it, I think I could have pushed a little farther... oh well, I'll keep that in mind for next time.
Thanks for reading, even if you didn't quite make it through the whole post.
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